I've got 3 african butterflyfish in my 46 gallon tank.
They were originally fed crickets only prior to arriving at my house. Crickets are inconvenient to feed daily (and highly expensive in comparison to flake and pelleted foods).
I slowly began to feed them Nutrafin MAX flake (which is mainly for the serpae tetras in the tank). And Wardley Floating Cichlid pellets (that I'd left to soak prior to feeding so that they were easy to bite). They get crickets once every two weeks now. Flake daily for the tetras (which they nibble on), and cichlid pellets every other day.
2 of the 3 ABF's took to this new diet immediately, continuing to retain their stocky and solid body-shape (and improving in colour too!). The 3rd ABF hasn't eaten in about a week. I figured that if I left it long enough, eventually he'd get hungry and eat, but that doesn't seem to be the case. He refuses to eat pellets and flake. His stocky and solid body shape has deteriorated to being very thin and bony-looking.
I have a 10 gallon tank in another room that I'm using to grow out an Angel an inch or so so that he's big enough to go into the 46 gallon without getting picked on by the Serpae tetras (and hold a handful of corys and a couple otocinclus until I move them in two weeks). Should I move the not-eating ABF to this tank? What can I do to get him to eat?
They were originally fed crickets only prior to arriving at my house. Crickets are inconvenient to feed daily (and highly expensive in comparison to flake and pelleted foods).
I slowly began to feed them Nutrafin MAX flake (which is mainly for the serpae tetras in the tank). And Wardley Floating Cichlid pellets (that I'd left to soak prior to feeding so that they were easy to bite). They get crickets once every two weeks now. Flake daily for the tetras (which they nibble on), and cichlid pellets every other day.
2 of the 3 ABF's took to this new diet immediately, continuing to retain their stocky and solid body-shape (and improving in colour too!). The 3rd ABF hasn't eaten in about a week. I figured that if I left it long enough, eventually he'd get hungry and eat, but that doesn't seem to be the case. He refuses to eat pellets and flake. His stocky and solid body shape has deteriorated to being very thin and bony-looking.
I have a 10 gallon tank in another room that I'm using to grow out an Angel an inch or so so that he's big enough to go into the 46 gallon without getting picked on by the Serpae tetras (and hold a handful of corys and a couple otocinclus until I move them in two weeks). Should I move the not-eating ABF to this tank? What can I do to get him to eat?