Food for Anomalochromis sp.

[BadHairDay]

Hi, I'm struggling to find a suitable food form for my butterfly cichlids. They are adults, and a few years old, so I'm keeping them alive, but they are so difficult to feed that I'm also massively overfeeding and thus risk polluting the tank with uneaten food.
The problem is that they are very nervous, so when I go to feed them they disappear, and don't come out again for at least a minute or two. Pelleted food tends to sink too quickly, and they tend to ignore it anyway, and general flake is so small that it immediately breaks down into a cloud of tiny particles.
I've tried small sticks, but they go the other way and take an age to sink (and the fish won't feed from the surface).
Is there a middle ground, a mid-size flake or other that sinks slowly enough for my daft fish to spot it and grab it?
I'm in the UK, and if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears, thank you!

 

[gwand]

I feed my Anomalochromis thomasi Repashy Grub, which I put in a small dish on the substrate. In this manner there is no mess on the substrate. I also feed them Omega One mini pellets, which are slow sinkers, frozen brine shrimp and frozen blood worms.

 

[GaryE]

I'll say this could be way easier than you think. Or not.

First, how is the tank decorated. Are there broad leafed plants for cover?
How large is the tank?
What else is in there?
What is the substrate (fine, medium or pebbles)?

Are the fish showing signs of wasting?

thomasi are a fish I've kept several times, and they will eat most foods. They just won't look like they do. The food will fall in, in the usual small quantities, and in time, when it's softened in the water, they'll eat it. If you have only one brand of flake, no. A lot of fish dislike one food in particular (flake and pellet are the same, just in differing formats).

Underfeed, and they'll get to it.

@gwand and I have both bred and raised thomasi, so we aren't just taking wild guesses. In the years I kept mine, they simply didn't grab. Sometimes, they stayed back when the food went in, or seemed to ignore it.

Extra nervousness can be an issue. How often do you do partial water changes, and how much? Fish can get skittish as water becomes polluted. I'm a 30% per week water changer.

 

[gwand]

An interesting behavior I have observed in my thomasi (whom I feed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays) is on non-feeding days they become earth eaters. They eat the sand where food landed on feeding days. They take the sand in their mouths, process some nutrients from it and then spit out the sand. Maybe Gary E has observed this too.

 

[GaryE]

I've seen quite a bit of sifting when I've kept them. It's why I asked about substrate. To me, with fish that have these habits, flake that breaks up is no issue. They'll get it all within 24 hours of it going in, if you don't overfeed. Too much food going in can be a disaster, and we have a tendency to do that when we don't see a fish eating.

If the fish are getting thin, that's another issue though.

 

[BadHairDay]

Thank you all, that made for some interesting reading, and I will look into Gwand's food suggestions.

In answer to your questions, the tank is 84 litres (22 US gallons), and is reasonably heavily (if not artistically) planted, at least to the point where I often struggle to find two 9cm fish! The substrate is a mixture of gravel and some other, finer plant-friendly substrate I can't remember the name of, so not siftable. It's very much a 'legacy' tank, set up years and years ago, currently housing the pair, three old chain loaches, one river goby, a zebra peckoltia, and six amano shrimps.

Water-wise, I probably only do water changes (with mineralised RO water) every couple of weeks. Parameters: Nitrates are (always high) at 250, nitrites zero, GH 7, Kh 10, PH 6.4, according to a paper strip test.

The fish look healthy enough, and colour up nicely, and have bred successfully in the past. I suspect the skittishness dates back to after the last batch of fry, and the removal of a second female, who was being bullied almost to death. I tried to minimise the disruption by using bottle trap for removal of the fry and other adult, but I think it did upset the adults.

Intriguingly, since the removal of the other female many months ago, the pair have shown no interest in even laying, and yes, I am sure that one of the remaining pair is a female

Thanks again for your input.

 

[gwand]

The nitrate level is terribly high. More frequent and larger water changes are called for as well as a reduction in stock. It’s possible the thomasi are skittish because they are irritable from the high nitrate concentration.