[Harbrook]

I have just bought 5 lovely yellow lab juv's (they are 2" now).... they are my first ever cichlids, and i wanted to give them the best food i could get hold of!.
I went for hikari food as it was the best available, and i bought Cichlid excel pellets (MIni) and Algae wafers....
THEY WONT EAT any of it !!!!
but they love Tetra Pro Vegetable crisps!!!!.
any reason for this????
i have so much of the cichlid excel!!!: help!!

any advice ot feeding would be GREATLY appreciated!
thanks
Darren.

 

[f u z z]

Just return the food. I feed my labs Omega One, and New Life Spectrum.

Picky eaters?

 

[Harbrook]

of course i tried to feed them the food, so it's open, no return available unfortunalty!
now i have loads and loads a pellets, and no-one to eat them,, can i ween them on to the pellets, i heard that the hikari cichlid excel should be one of the best foods available!

 

[yellow]

try soaking the pellats for a short time, i use them and i find that they are harder than the typical food and some smaller fish have difficulty with them but now they gobble them down.

 

[Harbrook]

i have left them in the tank for over 20 mins sometimes, and still no enthusiasm.. does it make a difference by soaking them before they go in the tank?

 

[dreday]

yea they sink faster.

you could grind them up or crush them first to. also if you feed them a mix they might start to eat it.

at 1st with new fish it will take a week or two to get them on a good diet. who knows what the lfs was feeding them. they need time to adjust. so pick a couple of brands and stick with that. they will get hungry soon enough and eat whatever you give them. so go with hikari and some pellets and i would use spirulina of some sort. that should be a good mix.

 

[xenergyx]

^^^ my big socolofi will eat the mini pellets whole, but I use 2 spoons to crush my mbunas food everytime I feed them so that my labs can eat it...

They aren't yet big enough to eat the food whole since they have much narrower mouths than the other tank mates, and they prefer sinking food which the crushed sinks somewhat.

My fish wouldn't hardly touch the hikari at first because it floated and it was so big they could not eat it. crushing it with 2 spoons was all it took to get them to feed like little piranhas again... :lol:

The only downside to crushing the food is all the little particles it makes that the fish wont eat...

This will be perfect for me once my fry are big enough for the big tank, but now its a total mess...luckily though as soon as I turn my filters back on it all blows to one end of the tank and usually into the filters or my bala sharks mouth...