Feeding Frogfish

want2bsleepy · Jul 27, 2017

Hello all fellow frogfish owners! How often and what do you feed your frogfish? We just got a little 2-3 inch painted frogfish, and we were told once a week feeding of 1-2 ghost shrimp is good. It just doesn't seem like much to me, and Squishy, the frogfish, moves around a lot hunting and sticks out his lure if you stick your hand in the tank.

Any recommendations???

Thanks!

lion king · Jul 27, 2017

I feed ghosties and mollies. At 2-3" he could easily take 4-6 ghosties depending on how big they are, every other day or every third day. Feed him until you see a nice bulge in his belly, not so much where he will explode; overfeeding is very detrimental so be careful. But underfeeding them they can also waste away, so a very delicate balance. They will play you like they are starving so be careful. Find a fresh water store that gets in baby or small mollies, a painted angler will eat you out of house and home; so eventually you'll be feeding him dozens of ghosties to keep him satisfied. Although they can eat something as large as themselves; feeding them too large of prey will kill them, I know from experience, feed them small 2-3 baby mollies is better than 1 big one. Eventually he will need a good size molly or 2 maybe twice a week. Besides them stopping eating all together, overfeeding is likely the next thing that kills them. I'm a strict advocate for feeding them live, I don't believe in stick feeding; but some do. Feeding live can be expensive so hopefully you have a good ghostie source. I have good source for small mollies, a good size freshwater store will always have customers bringing them in; they are easy to breed. I can go on forever, so any questions I'll be happy to answer them. You can read several of my post for more info.

want2bsleepy · Jul 28, 2017

lion king said:
I feed ghosties and mollies. At 2-3" he could easily take 4-6 ghosties depending on how big they are, every other day or every third day. Feed him until you see a nice bulge in his belly, not so much where he will explode; overfeeding is very detrimental so be careful. But underfeeding them they can also waste away, so a very delicate balance. They will play you like they are starving so be careful. Find a fresh water store that gets in baby or small mollies, a painted angler will eat you out of house and home; so eventually you'll be feeding him dozens of ghosties to keep him satisfied. Although they can eat something as large as themselves; feeding them too large of prey will kill them, I know from experience, feed them small 2-3 baby mollies is better than 1 big one. Eventually he will need a good size molly or 2 maybe twice a week. Besides them stopping eating all together, overfeeding is likely the next thing that kills them. I'm a strict advocate for feeding them live, I don't believe in stick feeding; but some do. Feeding live can be expensive so hopefully you have a good ghostie source. I have good source for small mollies, a good size freshwater store will always have customers bringing them in; they are easy to breed. I can go on forever, so any questions I'll be happy to answer them. You can read several of my post for more info.

thanks so much! Yeah, I've been worried that we are underfeeding him. Hoping that we can find a dozen or so shrimp for him this weekend, we'll keep them in our biocube until feeding. We don't have a local fish store any more, closest one with freshwater is about 1:15 away, so we'll get some mollies when we can I guess.