Just Got Some Male Endler's

[peter1979]

Hello, ive just got 6 male endler's livebearers. These are my first ever fish, and are in a 30litre planted tank that has been cycled. I picked them up earlier today and they are currently exploring my tank. The ones i have seem to be slighly different from the photos. I picked them up from an endler's breeder, and he says they are N class. There dorsal fins are black with bright orange tips, one of them has a black dorsal with orange sopts on it. When i get a decent camera i will upload pics.
My main question is,
what is best to feed them on? The place i got them recommended aqua one discuss bits, crushed up really fine.


cheers
peter

 

[fishyfeet]

are they orange chests, i used to have three strains of endlers, di

 

[peter1979]

im really not sure. They are impossible to picture!!

 

[chrischeyne]

i would feed them somthing like tetra pro or even tetra baby witch is tiny flakes the tetra pro u will have to crush a little bit
good look with them

 

[OldMan47]

I feed my endlers mostly the same spirulina flake that I feed the rest of my fish. I am a registered endler breeder with wild type class N fish so I need to be very careful about not letting them get mixed in with any other fish. If you have class N fish, I would be quite surprised if they all look alike. There is great diversity in the appearance of class N endlers.

 

[peter1979]

Well the 6 males i have got are certainly lively. They are fascinating to watch and have been playing in the flow from my hob filter. I tried to feed them some of the Aqua one discus bits the person who sold me them recommended, and it needed to be crushed up finely so they could eat it. I immediately realised that i had overfed as it made a terrible mess on the surface and over substrate so i decided to do water change and clean up a bit.

I fed them some frozen bloodworm yesterday and they happily ate it.

My scarlet badis, however, turned his nose p at the discus bits and only took bloodworm.

Can i ask, is there a rule to feeding bloodworm? is it only recommended to occasionally feed it, or is it ok as a regular feed?

 

[OldMan47]

For the endlers, it should only be used sparingly. They need a lot of vegetable matter in their diets. The badis may be another story but I haven't studied them since I don't keep them. It is a good idea to find out the food requirements of each new fish you get. That way you can judge what the best diet might be for them. I keep mostly livebearers in about equal numbers between poeciliids and goodeids. Both sorts do very well in general with a high vegetable content food, so I always have lots of spirulina flake and similar foods on hand. Some of the friskier fish that I have tend to run along tetra lines and do better with a food mix that is higher in animal protein than my livebearers get. I add in live blood worms, frozen daphnia and frozen brine shrimp to their diet to bring up the animal protein content.