Pearlyscale butterfly not eating.

[city hunter]

I've had this fish for about a week and have tried mysis and flake with no luck. I'm getting a little worried. I've read garlic is a good for getting stubborn fish to eat.

 

Can anyone elaborate on how to prep a meal with garlic? Would I be mincing garlic up or using some kind of liquid form?

[NoobtoSalt]

There are many different brands of liquid form you can pick up from you lfs. I use Garlic Power from Brightwell and it works great. I know that OIAB here in Vancouver sells it, and most other lfs should have either that product or something similar. Good luck, hope your fish pulls through. Was the fish eating at the LFS when you got it?

[MVPaquatics]

Try live manila clams on the halfshell. They cant resist!

[MVPaquatics]

Further explained: I have had to acclimate a lot of butterflies and angelfish. Some go for mysis right off the bat. Most dont. For fussy eaters i go to the seafood market and buy small live manila clams. Then i crack one side open, wash out, and drop in. They usually cannot resist, if they do i just add like 2 drops of garlic juice from my chopped garlic jar. They always take that. From then on i will do the same thing but freeze the clam first. Gets them used to "dead" prepared stuff. Next i move to a good mixed food like rods or use frozen mysis. Then away you go!

[Electrokate]

Is it in a quarantine tank? I have a filefish in an almost bare tank for quarantine and she did not notice food floating around in the water, but when I turned the return pump off so only the powerhead was going the mysis shrimp settled into a corner and swirled slightly. Hazed her over there and she noticed the bobbing shrimp and ate them. I think some fish that forage rock and coral in the wild just won't eat food out of the water column, not at first, even though they did as larvae. Next day she ate it floating and then ate it in the water, but only with the pumps off and me at the other end of the room-some new fish are also just too scared of us to eat.

 

If you can't find the clams, there are some expensive but nice ones at City Market on NW 21st, have not been there in a few years but they had super clean displays and 5 different species of live clams. I tried NW oysters once, they had snails and limpets on them. Guess they were pretty fresh to have so much sealife on them but I don't want that unidentified sealife in my display... I had bought 6 and used one a day (they were huge), kept the rest in the fridge in a plastic shoebox of tank water changed daily for a week. It's not supposed to work but it did.

 

You could also try putting a cube of frozen food in plastic mesh, I use the stuff onions are sold in, and hang it from an algae clip. Then put something in the quarantine tank to show the fish how to eat, like a molly. Since mollies are brackish or freshwater I assume they don't carry diseases we are worrying about and they are pretty benign. And unlike guppies they don't swim straight into powerheads.

Kate