Fire Eel Feeding.oh And Look At These Spiny Eel!

[giant19000]

hey guys i was thinking can i feed my 12inch fire eel guppies??or if i put them in the tank will he eat them??i mean he doesnt even touch my balloon mollies???oh look at these beauties
FIRE EEL

and this one just beautiful

 

[nmonks]

The short answer is "where are you getting your guppies from?"

If you mean store-bought guppies, then no, these would not be safe. Quite the reverse. Farmed guppies are plagued with several incurable infections including Mycobacteria and Nocardia infections that only a fool would introduce to their aquarium.

But if you are going to breed your guppies at home, from stock known to be healthy and parasite-free, then yes, once gut-loaded, such guppies could be used as food. The downside to this approach is the insane expense, and once a predatory fish becomes addicted to live fish as food, switching them to anything else can be extremely hard. There's no practical or nutritional reason to adopt this approach; your spiny eel will do at least as well on other foods, and can be thus maintained at a fraction of the cost.

If you really want to use live foods, then buy a worm farm kit. Grow your own earthworms. Earthworms are parasite-free, easy to grow in quantity on garden and kitchen scraps, and because they are gut-loaded by default, their nutritional profile is excellent.

Cheers, Neale

 

[giant19000]

The short answer is "where are you getting your guppies from?"

If you mean store-bought guppies, then no, these would not be safe. Quite the reverse. Farmed guppies are plagued with several incurable infections including Mycobacteria and Nocardia infections that only a fool would introduce to their aquarium.

But if you are going to breed your guppies at home, from stock known to be healthy and parasite-free, then yes, once gut-loaded, such guppies could be used as food. The downside to this approach is the insane expense, and once a predatory fish becomes addicted to live fish as food, switching them to anything else can be extremely hard. There's no practical or nutritional reason to adopt this approach; your spiny eel will do at least as well on other foods, and can be thus maintained at a fraction of the cost.

If you really want to use live foods, then buy a worm farm kit. Grow your own earthworms. Earthworms are parasite-free, easy to grow in quantity on garden and kitchen scraps, and because they are gut-loaded by default, their nutritional profile is excellent.

Cheers, Neale

hey thanks you learn something everyday than what can i feed my south american leaf fish?

 

[nmonks]

Most success with leaffish has occurred when people have unlimited supplies of unwanted baby fish, typically things like guppies, mollies, killifish, cichlids, etc. Such people have fish houses and breed fish anyway, and the leaffish is simply a way of getting rid of unwanted deformed fry or whatever. I suppose insect larvae and small earthworms could also be used if you have a pond and/or compost heap.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has weaned South American leaffish onto dead foods. This is why they're so rarely traded. The African "leaffish" Ctenopoma acutirostre is just so much easier to keep and a far better community tank resident.

Cheers, Neale