Alright so I have a freshwater Stonefish (Batrachoididae) aka:Freshwater lionfish, toadfish, frogfish.
He only eats live food. When I first got him i wanted him to clean out my baby cichlids which he did. He ate every last one of them even the one that was gettin kindv'e big he finally ate about a week ago.
But now I'm not sure what to do. I really don't like the idea of getting feeders from the lfs because they are a pretty grimy fish store to begin with. I don't want any diseases in my tank and my cichlids won't have actual swimming babies for atleast a couple more weeks.
Any ideas?
Yes, I have a practical idea.
Buy a 10 gallon aquarium with a heater, good lighting, and a filter that has small holes at the end of the siphon to stop small fish from getting traped. Make this tank as nice as you want and put it in any place you like. You can now buy some guppies which are excelent breeders and put about 10 inside the 10 gallon tank. Hopefully soon enough you will have tiny babys inside the tank and then you can start your own breeding center.
Be careful though, the Mature guppies will eat there own babys and so a breeding net is a goos idea.
Yeah snowboss said I should try guppies. I have a 10 gallon in the basement i just have to convince snowboss to give me the filter back. We'll see, thanks!
Another question after i start getting babies to put in the tank. (i'll be putting them in at night) but will my convicts kill them before my stonefish gets a chance to eat them?
Well, I would have to imagine so for most chiclids will eat live food and they are MORE THAN LIKELY faster than than the stone fish. But you shoould try it out and see for some of the guppies may swim infront of the Stone fish and then you wont have a problem. But to solve a problem like this means you have to figure out what is best for I dont know any real good solutions.
Hope it goes well.
Aquarist enthusiest Darkruby
i used to feed them to my saltwater lionfish, but when i got rid of the saltwater tank i feed them to the electric eels and aripaima gigas...
i'm pretty sure that your little stone fish would munch on these guys... just get some tongs or forcepts and wiggle the fish in front of it... trust me it will eat these guys...
Do they usually sell those at lfs's? I will try them first maybe he will like them. I'd rather do that instead of buying a bunch of guppies although I just set up my 10 gallon to start cycling for them.
Hell if the silversides work i'll keep the 10 gallon setup and put something cool in it.
Is 10 gallon too small for doing anything saltwater? Like a reef tank maybe or maybe 1 nice sw fish?
Edit:
How long are the silversides? Are they kindv'e big or are they smaller?
are ur lfs really that bad out in new york? i live in a small city, we have 4 lfs store around, 2 out of the 4 are awsome caregivers. the main one i go to, petland, the guy running the fish department takes alot of pride in the tanks at the store. if he sees any fish in the tanks that are sick or dieing, he quarentines them in the back. the other one is a family owned shop, they dont have alot of salt tanks but they are crystal clear and emaculate. they have the best prices on alot of scavengers. i pay $1.00 ea for blue legged crabs, thats a steal.
the other stores are just horrible. Petco, the water is piss yellow!even in the fresh tanks. the other one is preferred pets, they just plain suck. the guy who runs the fish department is an ass. i went in one day and found a cleaner shrimp i wanted. for 16 dollars he wouldnt sell it to me, because he said i mix things in my tank that shouldn't be mixed. this guy keeps a tally on the things i bought and made an ass out of himself doin it. everything he said bout mixing the fish is BS, i bought every thing he told me not to at petland, and everything is still alive
its just so hard to hear bout a gigantic city having problem in the fish stores. the guy that started the online ordering sites must have been a new yorker. sorry to hear bout ur troubles with shopping guys
Well there are 2 near me. The one is kindv'e bad, same as snowboss we will buy supplies from them but their fish are questionable. I bought a freshwater lobster(crayfish) from them for $10 and he lived for lik 2 - 3 months. He had some disease that made him lethargic all the time. All the sw fish snowboss bought from there died short after.
The other one near me just opened after the old owners retired. The new people are young and when I first went in there they didn't seem to know much about anything. They had a few saltwater tanks and like 10 freshwater tanks, each without about 2 fish in them. The woman didn't know at first what i was talking about when I asked her if she carried substrate.
Then again they just opened, I will go again and see how they are. Pretty pricey supplies too.
If those silversides are pretty big I don't know if my stonefish will eat them. His mouth probably opens up to like 1/2 - 1 inch but he doesn't try to eat my cichlids. He only ate the babies which were really small.
try crappie minnows from a bait shop. just look at the water and ask what their water parameters are, most bait shops will tell you. and look at the minnows they scoop up, if you see flaws in the minnows, dont buy
I buy feeder goldfish for my Florida spotted gars and hydro gars but these fish will also eat freeze dried krill. They seem to be attracted to the orange color. I worry a little about introducing parasites with the feeder fish and I'll probably end up weening them to only krill at some point. I've bread mosquito fish for feeders and it takes months before they're big enough to use as feeders. It took a couple months to raise a few hundred feeder M fish (guppies basically) and a few days to run out. If you want to breed your own for food you'll need a bunch of large tanks with feeders of graduating sizes and IMO it's not worth the trouble. I know it's fun to see your fish hunt down live feeder fish, but almost any fish can be weened to other kinds of food. Hikari carnivore sticks are good, but as this food expands after getting wet my fish tend to over stuff themselves leading to excess waste in the tank. I like freeze dried krill because it takes a while for it to soften, has a lot of empty space inside each piece, and the fish can't gluttonize themselves as much as with the sticks.
I guess within the next few days I will try and see what my lfs has for frozen foods. He has been a couple weeks now without eating. I'm gettin a little worried about him. He is very active at night but for him not to eat in a while makes me nervous about him starving to death.
