I had someone ask me about my process for weaning lionfish onto frozen food, so I wanted to share what I wrote up about my process. I hope this might help someone who wants to get their first lionfish
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Weaning Lionfish Onto Frozen Food
In terms of training, I read a lot of different ways to do it, but here's what I ended up doing:
Step 1 - Live Ghost Shrimp
I kept the shrimp in a 5 gallon tank for a while and then I ended up ordering saltwater ghost shrimp online from
Floridapets.com and keeping them in a breeder box in my sump. Keeping them in my sump was easier since I didn't have to maintain another tank and I had to have them on hand for several months. Ghost shrimp aren't all that nutritional, so I would feed them some high quality flake or pellet food like Ocean Nutrition right before feeding them to the lionfish to make sure they were gut loaded.
When I first got the dwarf zebra and antennata, they were too shy to take food from my feeding tongs. I'd grab the shrimp by the tail with the tongs and then drop it in front of the lion so they saw it and let them hunt. After just a couple times of this, they realized the tongs meant food and would just take the live shrimp right from the tongs without me releasing it. I did this for a while to keep them to really associate the tongs with food. The tongs I have are about 12" long and look like big tweezers.
Step 2 - Starvation
It seems mean, but to get the lionfish interested in frozen food, you usually have to starve them for a while and get them nice and hungry. I kept feeding frozen to my eel and fu manchu who were entirely on frozen food, but I wouldn't offer any live food. I'd offer the frozen food to the antennata and dwarf zebra, but if they wouldn't eat it, they just wouldn't get any food. Lionfish can go several weeks without eating, so it doesn't do them any harm to starve them for a week or so. If they hadn't eaten anything after a week, I'd give them a live shrimp and then start over again.
Step 3 - Variation in Frozen Food Offered
It took a bit to figure out what frozen food they would go for. I kept starving them and offering a variety of different frozen foods using the feeding tongs. After not very long, the antennata decided to go for PE mysis. I think this worked well because a lot of the mysis in PE mysis are whole and look a lot like a live ghost shrimp. I'd pick out the whole PE mysis and hold one by the tail and wiggle it gently in front of the antennata so it would look like a live shrimp. Once she ate the first one, she was pretty quick to realize this was food and always take PE mysis when offered. However, my dwarf zebra was super stubborn and still wouldn't go for anything frozen. He'd starve for a week, eat the live ghost shrimp, and then repeat.
Step 4 - Patience
The dwarf zebra took months to convert onto frozen, so patience is key. I just kept trying and finally ended up offering him some frozen krill, which is really unhealthy but fish like to go crazy for it. Its like potato chips. If you feed lionfish too much krill or only krill, it can end up causing them to be very unhealthy and die, but its ok once in a while or to wean them. Anyway, I FINALLY got the dwarf zebra to take some krill. This took several times of him striking at it and then spitting it out. Or he'd swallow it but realize it wasn't what he wanted and not take any more. After lots of patience he started eating the krill regularly, but then I had to convince him to eat something more nutritionally complete.
Step 5 - Transitioning to Healthy Food
I started stuffing the krill with pellets and mysis to try to make sure the dwarf zebra was getting the right nutrition. Then I just kept offering PE mysis and other frozen foods along with the krill to try to get him to take something else. After some more patience, he finally took PE mysis. Again, it took a while to get him eating it regularly, so patience is key. At this point I was able to take away the krill and I had both the dwarf zebra and antennata eating PE mysis without any issues.
Step 6 - Varying the Diet
For quite a while, they'd only take PE mysis that were whole shrimp, but after getting used to eating frozen, they've slowly started accepting other foods that I offer. At this point they now eat anything I give them. They still eat lots of PE mysis, but they also get squid, scallop, salmon, and prawn chunks regularly. It just took them a while to realize that chunks of food that don't look like a whole shrimp were still food.
The take away message here is that every lionfish is different. My fu manchu was already eating frozen silversides at the LFS, so I didn't have to wean him. He was there for a couple weeks and they were able to get him eating frozen. The antennata was really very easy and took only a couple weeks to wean. However, my dwarf zebra took MONTHS. You just have to have patience and stick with it and keep trying different things. I hope this helps!
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IMG_1762 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
IMG_1783 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
IMG_1776 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flick
IMG_1773 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
IMG_1764 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
IMG_1792 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
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IMG_1812 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
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IMG_1807 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
IMG_1801 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
IMG_1816 by Felicia Svedlund, on Flickr
