Feeding hippocampus capensis

[g1mme]

Hi all

I've been catching live food everyday from our lagoon to feed our seahorses. I now cannot go out everyday to collect food and need an alternate source.
I live in South Africa so buying reach is severely limited and I've heard whispers of a refugium?

If any one has any links to how to build one and what types of foods I can grow in there for my SH I would be extremely grateful.

Thanks


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[g1mme]

Could I maybe just grow food in another tank and scoop it into the seahorse tank even?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[rayjay]

Growing live food in sufficient quantities to feed seahorses, even just one, can be a daunting task as most life forms they will eat don't grow and multiply all that fast. It becomes a very labour intensive task to have any meaningful quantities.
Seahorses would QUICKLY decimate the population of even a large refugium so that by itself is not the answer. Nor is a single tank to grow pod forms in.
The more seahorses you have the bigger the set up needs to be to raise live foods.
Why are you not converting them over to eat frozen foods?
For some, they can feed live mysids and gradually mix in some frozen mysis. When they start to snick the frozen, increase the amount gradually until each feeding is totally frozen mysis.
In my case, as I already grow brine shrimp to adult and they are much easier than mysid, you can do the same by adding some frozen brine into the live brine mix and once they are on frozen brine then start adding frozen mysis into the mix.

 

[TamiW]

Agree with rayjay - growing food is a difficult task, and a refugium wouldn't be able to support seahorses. Expect anything that would grow enough food to be time consuming and take up a lot of space. A mysis generator might work, but they can be tricky to get set up right.

I would try to get some frozen mysis. Supposedly H. capensis are easy to convert to frozen food. It should be available in SA; there are plenty of seahorse keepers there that get it from someplace...