Tassled filefish: Feeding
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Food:
Omnivore, should be fed 3x daily. Will eat live food, meaty food, macroalgae, pellets and as addition - flakes. The main part - a lot of meaty food. Algae can be used as a snack, or before the feeding, when fish is hungry.
Your experience may differ. Just like people, the individuals have own likes and dislikes.
What mine does not eat: most of available dried algae, including particularly made for a fish, mussels, and the homemade mix of the seafood and fishfood. Tried different recipes.
Perfectly understandable: as any of us, one day Fuzzy likes one kind of food, and another day - another food. If not offer anything else at all, it may start eating, under treat of death. Anyway, with mixes not all pieces were eaten, too much pollution for the tank.
Instead, each kind of food is cut separately, and if it don't like the particular kind today, the other kind of the food will be given.
The choice is (in order of preference, all is raw, unsalted, no preservatives):
- grocery shrimp, salmon, silver fish, baby cuttlefish, baby octopus, squid. The more varieties you can find - the better. Saltwater origin only, same rule as for feeding lionfish.
- Frozen krill from LFS.
- Medium marine pellets (soaked in advance): Formula Two, Kent Reef Carnivore and ChromaXtreme. Formula Two is preferred.
- Formula two flakes, only big pieces, the small are ignored.
- Dried algae: nori, not every kind. Sometimes - edible macroalgae from refugium (ochtodes), eats or just tears away - can't say for sure.
- The threats are: the live ghost shrimp, fed exclusively by seafood, frozen Mysis shrimp and Marine Cuisine.
Feeding:
All sources agree, that that fish should be fed at least 3 times a day. It seems to be the all day long grazing fish, so it is fed trice daily.
On the left: preparing to feed, when the fish was young. Volitan lionfish eats first, Fuzzy waits.
Watch for a size of pieces of food: the file's teeth are more for nibbling (or taking the food), than for biting or chewing. Fish have to be able to excrete the piece without troubles, in case if it will pass undigested.
Note, that the big fish eats a lot and produces a lot of wastes. The peculiar thing is that the wastes are disposed in the stream of powerhead, near the fish's home place. And distributed by the 620 gph flow across the tank...
As fish grow, too small pieces became not worthy attention, so far 3-5 mm (1/8 - <1/4 in.) are the best. Smaller - for the harder food, like cuttlefish and some parts of shrimp, larger - for easily falling apart, like fish.
As a highest prize for this fish, it has its own volunteer-butler, and I'm more in nutrition, supply and maintenance, and in attendance of the not so worthy small fish and corals.
Live soft-shelled shrimp:
Although it will eat the grocery seafood, the live food - especially the shrimp, alive and kicking, is strongly preferred.
The trouble is, that it's too costly to feed this way the fish of this size (each feeder shrimp is 30-50 cents a piece, size independent).
And if there are another fish in the tank, that accepts only live food, the Fuzzy always finds its way to have a share: comes from the back of the net, biting through the net, the shrimp is no longer moving - the lion will not eat unmoving prey - the shrimp now will be given to a Fuzzy.
Another its approach is to keep close to the lion after the main feeding is done. The shrimp will appear in vicinity, and may the fastest and strongest win! Guess, who it will be...
The analog of shepherd's hook - bent rigid acrylic tubing, 5/16" - very gently under the muzzle, keeps Fuzzy away. The fish is offended, but not much - it is quite good natured. In some cases it is rewarded with another shrimp, it's not worth to keep fish frustrated.
Sometimes the lion changes it's mind, and the shrimp is roaching around the tank, then the hunt begins.
By the way, because of such high interest to the soft-shelled shrimp, no peppermint shrimp will last long in the tank, nor a large amount of the feeder shrimp, that could be kept in tank as always available prey and tank cleaners.
Frozen cubes:
Another way to get a share of preferred food: Fuzzy likes Mysis shrimp, Marine Cuisine, and sometimes Ocean Plankton, as an addition to the thawed Krill and the grocery seafood.
Again, for a fish of this size such feeding is quite expensive. But being given to the other fish in the tank, it lies just before Fuzzy's eyes - as in Mandarine Diner. One just have to figure out, how to get this food.
On the left: Thinking. This way it doesn't work. Got it! If work fast by side fins, the food will be blown out.
Macroalgae:
Getting something new to graze on - the new LR, edible macroalgae (especially not dried), is always appreciated. Here is the blue ball, or purple bush, ochtodes macroaldae, removed from another tank. Not so much eating, as tasting, but Fuzzy becomes of rich, saturated colors in anticipation (see on the left).
Close ups:
Close up of the filefish (on the left): the first ray of a dorsal fin, snout and tassels.
Love this fish.