Wean Long Nosed Hawkfish off Live Food

[SigmaVX]

Have a healthy long nose hawk that refuses to eat frozen (mysis), fresh (reef nutrition roe or pods), or any pellets/flakes. He devours small live feeder shrimp. I’ve tried garlic and mixing things up. Any suggestions from the pros on how I can move him over to frozen or fresh?

 

[Lbrdsoxfan]

Weird, my old longnose and Falco would never turn down frozen mysis, they loved it and brine shrimp.

I'd say starve it out for a few days and introduce the frozen mysis. I started out giving mine frozen brine and mysis from a pipette and they eventually took to it.

P.S. they are into live, it's gonna be rough to convert them...

 

[Uncle99]

Mine eats PE Mysis only and Krill.

 

[SigmaVX]

Quick update. I had some success doing two things: 1) I put some live shrimp in a bag and floated. Hawk was going nuts seeing them and I added reef nutrition mysis around the bag. In snapping at the shrimp he ended up taking some of the mysis. 2) moved shrimp to acclamation box and proceeded to add some mysis into box where flow would spill some mysis out that he ate. Hope this helps someone some day.

 

[SigmaVX]

Quick update. The acclimation box trick seems to be working. The key is adding some food inside the box so that flow blows it outside the box where the hawk is always watching. He is not 100% off but each day he is taking more to prepared foods.