Are anyone else's fish bad at eating novel foods?

[Seisage]

Within the past couple weeks, I've added a couple pellet foods to my neon tetra's feeding rotation to vary his diet. His previous owner only fed him flakes. He still gets flakes, just not every day. And... well... there's really no other way to say it. He's pretty bad at eating the pellets. He will eat them, to be clear, but he's just not very good at it and he doesn't seem as excited about the pellet foods as he does about the flakes. Even the Hikari vibra bites, which are red and meant to look like bloodworms, don't elicit a strong reaction from him, although he likes them better than the other pellets. He also has a bit of trouble getting them into his mouth sometimes, even though the vibra bites are "baby" sized and the other pellets are 1mm and meant for fry He'll sometimes have to "chew" them for a bit and occasionally, if it takes too long, he'll just give up and drop them. He still eats flakes readily, so I don't think it's an appetite issue. I genuinely just think he's not very used to pellet foods.

Has anyone else encountered this with their fish? I've known marine animals in my care to take some time to get used to new food. There were some sea stars I had collected from the wild that previously ate primarily clams and barnacles, and it took them some time to learn how to hunt urchins. I would imagine similar phenomena happen in freshwater aquarium fish too.

 

[Back in the fold]

Fish are funny . They like what they like and they don’t like what they don’t like . They get used to one food and that’s all they’ll eat . Most animals are monovores . They eat one thing and that’s it . Cows eat grass , birds eat seeds but not bugs or bugs but not seeds but there are exceptions . Ah but I digress . Give them something they can smell like frozen brine shrimp or something that moves like live fruit flies . If they get hungry enough they’ll eat . Neon Tetras have a small mouth and maybe your pellets are too big or too crunchy for him . Try newly hatched baby brine shrimp on him . He’ll go nuts for them .

 

[GaryE]

For small fish, pellets can be a problem. The industry loves them, but I see them sitting on the bottom til they soften enough to be easily eaten. I see fish dragging them across their teeth, spitting them out and dragging them across again. And again.
They're a popular, easily manufactured format. I've run them through an old coffee grinder I have here to almost powder them, and then they are rapidly eaten. In general, when I use prepared food, I use flake. For small fish, it's better (IMHO).
It isn't nutrition, or anything at that level. It's a poor format for feeding small fish with.

 

[Magnum Man]

I use a mortar & pestle to grind pellets into dust for fry and smaller fish... also have a dedicated coffee bean grinder ( cheap electric ) I bought, to chop up dried black fly larvae into smaller pieces

but yes they can be picky & like what they like or get used to... I added Bug Bites to the rotation I do on foods, & as much as everyone brags up that food, it one of most of my fishes least favorite foods