Blue Green Chromis

[VtecGuy88]

Hey guys, So everyday when I feed my tank my tang and angel pretty much eat up all the pellets. I feed pellets everyday and I alternate days with the food clip. One day I feed shrimp and the next I will feed Seaweed. My tang takes care of the seaweed and my clown and wrasse love the shrimp. Now on to my main question. My chromis (5) will pick at the pellets but never really eat them and I never see them picking at the shrimp or seaweed either. The only time I ever see them eat anything is in the early morning. When I get home from work and turn on my lights there are copepods covering the front of my tank and my chromis have a field day eating them. Is this enough to keep them alive or should I be trying to feed something else just for them?

 

[Shabalaba]

Chromis need to be fed often due to their size and high metabolism. The problem you may be experiencing with your current pellet food is that the pellets are too large for the chromis' small mouths. Try getting a flake food or 0.5 mm pellets

 

[Maddlesrain]

I would definitely find something that they’ll readily eat at least once a day (Mine get fed 3x a day on most days). Chromis are pretty busy fish, so they’ll likely starve without a secondary food source. Mine like brine shrimp (regular and spirulina), mysis, pellets (the micro pellets are easier for them to eat), bloodworms, marine cuisine, formula one, fish eggs, and just about anything else frozen I throw in the tank. I’ve recently fed live adult brine and live blackworms for some new anthias and they also slurped those down. Your group should come around if you keep trying different stuff. They’ll get to the point of following you as you walk by and attempting to eat your fingers. Mine will attempt to eat just about anything. When my family eats seafood for dinner I’ll take a shrimp or some lobster chunks and toss those in as well and they’ll eat until they look like little blimps. Haha
Here are two of mine crowding the glass waiting to be fed:

 

[YellowFinsReef]

Although Chromis are in the "Easy" fish category, however, I personally think that they should be on the "Expert" fish category due to their feeding requirements and low survival rates in captivity - of course there are the occasional ones that make it, but I've had more died than make it.

I love schooling fish and try to imitate that in my system. I have a school of 30-something, I started with 50, but 10-something died. The best way to get these fish to survive is to gut load and condition them 4-6x a day the moment they hit your tank for 2 weeks. The reason I say this is because these fish are kept in lots of up to 5000 at the distributors - as you can see, with that amount, it's hard to maintain quality control - so, most of these fish come in starved and diseased.

The copepods alone in your live rocks are not sufficient for them to survive. For my school of chromis, I have them on a 6-8x a day feeding schedule that consists of crush pellets, PE mysis, PE calanus, fish eggs, & LRS Fertility. They've grown quite a bit in the last few months and I plan to put them in my 300G when I upgrade.

 

[VtecGuy88]

Thanks for the help everyone. I feed freeze dried bloodworms regularly to my son's neon tetra tank. I will definitely try to toss some over in the reef tank as well. My lfs said they should be getting sponsored soon and they will have mysis so ill pick some up when they get them.