Tropical Fish Forums

[eelman]

I got my fire eel about 7 months ago. He (I think its a he) is 10-11 inches long. for a couple of months I fed him red wigglers from petco. then for a while I fed him small earthworms (not red wigglers). now I am putting him back on red wigglers (because it is too cold to look for worms outside) and he will not eat them. I think it is because they release a chemical that tastes bad to some animals and I guess he was spoiled for a while with good tasting earthworms and now he is being picky. he has been eating the java fern in the aquarium for a while and he is doing just fine.
I've heard of other eels eating plants too, he is not the first.

is eating plants bad for him? does he get everything he needs? do you think he eats to his fill or just enough to keep him alive?

the big question: what should I do?

I will see what I can do about getting earthworms in the winter (not red wigglers), but do I have any other options?

remember: he has a small mouth.

also, I've already tried frozen bloodworms, brine shrimp, and krill, even soaked in garlic. no luck.

[eelman]

one more thing (and I'm serious here):

would adding plants that are more palatable than java fern be a good idea?

[Senor]

try going to your local fish and tackle store for earth worms

[eelman]

anything they sell is way too big. thanks though.

[Cathy G]

Hi,

Our fire eel is about 12 inches long and we feed him small and large red worms that we get from the local bait shop. If the worm is too large, cut it in 1/2.

My husband would like nothing better tahn to feed his eel vegies once in a while. It's funny yours is naturally eating the plants, but as they are predators, they will need protein.

Have you tried live brine shrimp?

Cathy

[eelman]

cathy, the problem with brine shrimp is there are other fish in the tank that will get them long before the eel would. even now, as soon as the eel spits out a worm, another fish grabs it immediately.

I guess I will have to get some earthworms and cut them up. but of course this thread has only been going for a little bit, so hopefully someone will come in with a really good idea.

one thing I thought of is somehow getting the bad taste off of the red worms. like soaking/rinsing (cruel, I know), or somehow flavoring them with something like garlic. any ideas on this one?

[Cathy G]

Because our worms from the bait shop come in 'dirt' we have to rinse them off under the tap before we feed them. Maybe thats why we've never had any trouble? Do you rinse well? Maybe that will scare the worm into releasing that chemical. (Are you sure they have this chemical thing going - I've never heard of this before. Maybe you just got a bad batch of worms and thats when he stopped eating...)

If he is only eating earthworms, than I'd buy some of those and cut them into pieces...

We have our eel in with freeding/frenzy rainbows. Until we trained the eel to come up and take the worm from our fingers, I used to use a long piece of pvc pipe and use it to funnel the food past the rainbows to the lower level. The rainbows wised up to that pretty quick however.

Since our eel eats frozen/thawed blood worms, I used to drop clumps of those down the pvc shoot in front of the eel's cave. He get some of them before the rainbows discovered what was going on.

I hope you can figure something out!
Cathy
I assume his water is really good? That you do regular water changes and that he doesn't have some disease?

[tkipfer]

it doesn't matter if they are to big for him as you can cut them up ( not for the faint of heart) for him. my tire track eel loves his earth worms and feeder shrimp.
_________________
"I am a wildlife warrior, and I will fight, fight to the death for wildlife." - Steve Irwin

[eelman]

the water quality is not something I thought of. I don't think it is a problem, I do maintenance pretty often, but I will experiment. thanks for that idea.

I used to feed the eel by dropping cut-up chunks of earthworm down a tube. looks like I might go back to doing that again. maybe I should try with bloodworms.


and yeah, I'm sure about the whole tasting bad thing with red wigglers. I can't find the site right now but I remember the "foetida in their latin name means something like "tastes bad" because when cut or violently disturbed they release a chemical that tastes bad enough to stop some animals from eating them.