Apistogramma Diet

[Iamtechno13]

Recently I have picked up a bunch of frozen food at my lfs and I'm sure its all safe but is there anything that Apistogramma should NOT eat? I've been feeding brine shrimp, frozen spirulina brine shrimp, daphnia, cyclops, mysis shrimp, and rotifers by kind of randomly rotating between all of them except the daphnia feeding daphnia every seventh day. Everybody seems to be looking and doing good and recently I've had a number of females coloring up turning yellow in 5 different tanks almost all at the same time which was cool to see. I'm assuming that my diet is ok if not I'd love to hear otherwise and again, is there anything to NOT feed an Apisto?

 

[Cooder]

Beef heart. Ive read the mammalian fat is not easily digested leading to blockages etc.

Mozzie larvae are a good live food. All the stuff that you are feeding is good stuff. (But i cant speak for rotifers cause i dont know what it is lol)

 

[davidjp1982]

All I would say is feed the frozen bloodworms very sparingly I have lost a few apistos to bloat that I put down to bloodworms. Nowadays I feed bloodworm once a week or even fortnightly and a small amount at that maybe 4 or 5 worms per fish tops and I cut them up in the pot before feeding. Also I think live food is best mine get daphnia and grindal worms as a staple alternating with NLS pellets and frozen tubifex occasionally. They also go nuts over algae wafers once a week. Much like mine your fish sound like they eat better than I do so I wouldn't worry too much - variety is key

 

[Iamtechno13]

I've tried to get them to eat flakes/pellets with no luck. I had one out of like 30 fish that seemed kinda interested but nothing. I've also heard and read to many stories about people and aquatic worms so I am not even going to risk it by going down that road. I'll stick to what I've got. If I could find some blackworms I wouldn't mind throwing that in the rotation. Anybody know about earthworms? Can you have a little earthworm garden and use these as food? I know there are earthworm flakes and I've heard and read about people feeding earthworms but whats the deal with this? Any concerns with this?

 

[davidjp1982]

Grindals aren't aquatic and a lot of people use them for conditioning - super easy to keep a never ending supply of live food on the go - highly recommend them. Do your apistos just ignore the pellets or spit them out? I thought mine were just spitting them out but soon learned they grind them a little with the teeth in their throat then spit it out and come back again - I like to feed the nls as a staple so I know they are getting a good base of vitamins etc - maybe worth cutting back on the "goody" food and trying to establish a staple daily pellet - I think most fish will reject dry food if they know they will soon get frozen instead

 

[gerald]

Earthworms are fine - just a bit labor-intensive to feed to Apistos or other small fish. You can either dry them or freeze them, then chop on a cutting board.

 

[Iamtechno13]

Yeah I didn't feed them for a day and a half and then tried a couple flakes of each NLS, Cobalt, Omega One, and also pellets of the same brands to see if any were appetizing and they all looked at them like they were going to eat them but nothing until one of them tried it and spit it out then they all followed him in trying them out but none of them actually ate anything. I watched until the last one gave up and gave them another half hour and called it. It was about 2 hours before I just vacuumed all of it out of the bottom of the tank. I tried it a couple other times as well but they just don't want anything to do with flakes or pellets. I just went to the fish store yesterday and loaded up with all kinds of good foods for them. Got these new Piscene Energy Cyclops and they love those little things. How easy is it to keep Grindal Worms, and where do I acquire them?

 

[gerald]

Sometimes you can train fish onto pellets by soaking the pellets 10 min in "juice" from frozen bloodworm, brineshrimp, or seafood-market fresh shrimp. I've gotten blackbanded sunfish to eat small pellets this way.