What to do with a fish that only eats brine shrimp?

[Tripod1404]

Hey guys, I managed to wean a orange spotted filefish to brine shrimp. Right now he is in my fraq tank with lost of SPS frags. In my experience damage he does to established frags is minimal but newly fraged pieces that are under stress are more prone to bleaching from the attention from OSFF. Aside from that he is also eating copepods, pineapple sponges and seems to be eating vermetid snail (or their mucus web).

I am trying to wean her to other foods like mysis and flakes but she only wants to eat brine. I tried mixing spirulina brine with mysis, nutramar ova, calunus and flake food. She only eats the brine and ignores the rest. She seems to be somehow interested in flake but she never tries it (she comes really close as if she is going to bite, but then swims away). Interestingly she also picks on algae sheets, but I am not sure how valuable that food is for an non-herbivorous fish. I will also try easy reefs masstick fish food as she is more likely to pick on stuff (like algea sheets) than eating from water column.

Right now I am adding selcon to the spirulina brine shrimp and incubating it overnight in fridge before offering. In addition to regular hikari spirulina brine shrimp, I also ordered some gut loaded brine shrimp (beta-brine from reefnutrition and Enriched Frozen Brine Shrimp from brineshrimpdirect).

She also has the SPS corals to pick on but, she seems to be less interested in corals after I started to offer her brine at a regular basis. It is probably easier to eat brine shrimp than corals . Hopefully she will eventually accept non-brine shrimp foods but as of now this is the only prepared food she accepts. She put on some weight so it is clear she is not starving but I still have my concerns about a diet based mainly on brine shrimp and whatever she can find/hunt on her own.

Do you think gut loaded brine shrimp is nutritious enough to sustain it? As of now I did not try extreme measures like starving the fish until it accepts other stuff.

 

[moondoggy4]

Short answer Feed it brine shrimp just like you are doing mix it up with different additives. someday the fish might want to try something else. I have a Fijian Sailfin Bleeny and he never ate any offered food, and I mix it up with food for years, until one day he ate Cobalt flakes and now he likes different kinds of flakes. So as long as the fish is eating you have a chance.

 

[laga77]

I have a pair of Orange Spotted Filefish. Try live Blackworms, BBS, and blender mush. Keep offering the Ova as mine really like that.

 

[ca1ore]

Mix in other foods as suggested; eventually it will take other things. I was able to sustain and even fatten an Achilles Tang on just spirulina brine for almost 4 months in QT. Once in the display he got the hang of nori and has gradually moved other things. Still won't eat small Mysis though.

 

[MondoBongo]

food size is important to OSFF, i would suggest trying hikari myses. they're small enough to be a one strike mouthful for these fish.

additionally i'll echo what laga said and add that live white worms are also a great food source. my OSFF pair absolutely love them to the exclusion of other foods. i order my cultures from Angels Plus.

keep offering the flakes. it takes these fish some time to warm up to new foods. when i was introducing flakes to mine i would feed a small amount of flakes first, let them pick or ignore, before feeding some of the food that i knew they would eat. then i would mix small amounts of flakes in with other food, until they started taking them. the flakes mine prefer are the SeaChem ones that are red.

it can help if there are other fish for them to watch. they're curious animals, they observe, so when they see other fish eating it can help pique their interest.

are for the nori, mine do the same thing, and we're not alone. this is a common report from people keeping these fish. mine have gone ham on a clump of hair algae that i dislodged while cleaning a time or two as well.

Do you think gut loaded brine shrimp is nutritious enough to sustain it? As of now I did not try extreme measures like starving the fish until it accepts other stuff.

long term no, however now is not the long term. i wouldn't try anything drastic e.g. starving the fish to try to coerce them in to eating. your best best in my experience is slow and steady. you know what the fish eats, that's your bridge. focus on one new food and keep at it for some time until you're either convinced the fish will never take it, or it starts sampling. i'd say about two or three weeks before giving up.

i've found that without regular feedings these fish will drop weight like a stone. because of that i think trying to starve them or otherwise restricting their food intake is too high risk to be worth it. keeping them with acros definitely helps to buffer against this, but it is still challenging. when i first got them they were in tanks with no acros and i was needing to feed them 5+ times a day to keep their weight up. now that they're on better foods and in a large tank packed with acros i can keep their weight nice with only two feedings a day.

be mindful of size. nutramar/calanus seem too small to interest mine, and at first PE myses was too large. like i said above my breakthrough came with hikari myses which were that Goldilocks size that helped encourage them to take them. now they happily take hikari myses, pe myses, kirll, scallops, nori, flakes, and will usually at least sample anything medium sized i add.

i've also noticed that they will exhibit suppressed appetites for up to 5 days after being moved to a new home, and any variation of the water quality will drastically impact their feeding desire as well.

as ever here is my thread:

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2545824

it's a complete brain dump, but it follows mine from unbagging to current day. some helpful information there on feeding techniques and the like.

good luck. these fish are hands down my favorite and i always love to hear of people successfully keeping them. mine are nearing 18 months in my care and seem to be doing well so far.

cheers!

 

[Tripod1404]

food size is important to OSFF, i would suggest trying hikari myses. they're small enough to be a one strike mouthful for these fish.

additionally i'll echo what laga said and add that live white worms are also a great food source. my OSFF pair absolutely love them to the exclusion of other foods. i order my cultures from Angels Plus.

keep offering the flakes. it takes these fish some time to warm up to new foods. when i was introducing flakes to mine i would feed a small amount of flakes first, let them pick or ignore, before feeding some of the food that i knew they would eat. then i would mix small amounts of flakes in with other food, until they started taking them. the flakes mine prefer are the SeaChem ones that are red.

it can help if there are other fish for them to watch. they're curious animals, they observe, so when they see other fish eating it can help pique their interest.

are for the nori, mine do the same thing, and we're not alone. this is a common report from people keeping these fish. mine have gone ham on a clump of hair algae that i dislodged while cleaning a time or two as well.



long term no, however now is not the long term. i wouldn't try anything drastic e.g. starving the fish to try to coerce them in to eating. your best best in my experience is slow and steady. you know what the fish eats, that's your bridge. focus on one new food and keep at it for some time until you're either convinced the fish will never take it, or it starts sampling. i'd say about two or three weeks before giving up.

i've found that without regular feedings these fish will drop weight like a stone. because of that i think trying to starve them or otherwise restricting their food intake is too high risk to be worth it. keeping them with acros definitely helps to buffer against this, but it is still challenging. when i first got them they were in tanks with no acros and i was needing to feed them 5+ times a day to keep their weight up. now that they're on better foods and in a large tank packed with acros i can keep their weight nice with only two feedings a day.

be mindful of size. nutramar/calanus seem too small to interest mine, and at first PE myses was too large. like i said above my breakthrough came with hikari myses which were that Goldilocks size that helped encourage them to take them. now they happily take hikari myses, pe myses, kirll, scallops, nori, flakes, and will usually at least sample anything medium sized i add.

i've also noticed that they will exhibit suppressed appetites for up to 5 days after being moved to a new home, and any variation of the water quality will drastically impact their feeding desire as well.

as ever here is my thread:

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2545824

it's a complete brain dump, but it follows mine from unbagging to current day. some helpful information there on feeding techniques and the like.

good luck. these fish are hands down my favorite and i always love to hear of people successfully keeping them. mine are nearing 18 months in my care and seem to be doing well so far.

cheers!

MondoBongo, thanks for your help. Yesterday she accidentally ate a flake (it was seachem's green one). I say accidentally because I mixed it with brine shrimp and she accidentally ate one. Keeping her with other fish is definitely helping because she understood that if she is too picky, there will be nothing left to eat. So right now she is eating brine like there is no tomorrow. Since she is hurrying this much, a flake was mistaken for brine . Hopefully she can built on that.

I think these fish are also highly "vision oriented" in terms of deciding on what to eat (not surprising considering they eat small foods in nature.) I fed her spirulina brine shrimp so naturally see is attracted to green flakes . I ordered some beta-brine from reefnutrition that are bright red, I am hoping this will extend his metal image of "what is food and what is not", if she is not fixated on color, she might be more likely to try new stuff. I tried the smaller version of hikari mysis by mixing it with brine. She selected brine and left the mysis. I will try once again this weekend as she is becoming more and more flexible in terms of what she might eat.

My water quality is great with every parameter spot on and it is stable enough to allow acros grow.

 

[MondoBongo]

try feeding the new food first, give her a few seconds to consider it before feeding the regular stuff that she eats. they tend to be very considerate with new things. i've watched mine mock strike new food on many occasions only to back up and think about it some more.

i think you're spot on with the vision. when they're picking at my acros they like to take their time and examine things until they find just the right spot. i have a pet theory that their eyes are actually capable of some level of discernment in regards to the biofluorescence of the corals. i've also noticed using a yellow bypass filter under blue light that the OSFF themselves seem to have some level of biofluorescence as well.

i wanted to try using GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) to "mark" new foods to see if that would entice them any more to sample, but unfortunately GFP is prohibitively expensive for me as a hobbyist, and i have no idea about safe or unsafe it would be in food.

any ways, i'm rambling now. keep at it, she sounds like she's already doing quite well. good luck!