Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding Hand feeding the minnows

I only have minnows in the pond right now and I've been feeding them the smaller floating Aquamax. They nibble on the pellets but the pellets are really too big for them. I chopped up some of the pellets and that helped but the smaller pieces don't float and I can't watch them eat.

So...... I bought a small jar of TetraMin Tropical Flakes to try, I think it was less than $3.00 and the minnows LOVE it! They show a definite preference to the TetraMin over the Aquamax maybe due to the ease of eating the flakes. Even the smallest, tiny baby minnows will eat the flakes. When I put the TetraMin in the water the minnows really boil and several jump out of the water! The little jar of flakes has lasted longer than I thought it would.

When hand feeding, the minnows will nibble on your hand even after the food is gone, they don't do this if you put your hand in the water before handling the food so I'm guessing they can still smell the food on my hand.

Here's a video:

Minnow feeding

Use our pellet softening technique and it will solve your problem of getting minnows to eat pellets.
The methods works in a zip loc bag as Cecil explains below or you can use a cool whip or similar container. If in a container shake pellets until all water is absorbed about 1-2 minutes of continuous shaking. It may take a little experimenting with the amount of water to use. For AM-5D06 I usually start with abt 1/2 as much water as pellets. Less water makes them a little dryer which can also be good for crumbling and feeding. Each batch of pellets seems to hydrate a little differently. Loretta - I developed this technique and shared it first with Cecil. If you store unused feed in the frig it will keep at least 2 days when it becomes more crumbly - perfect for minnow food. Don't feed moldy pellets.
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=273124

Loretta will probably have predators eating out of her hand too. You are going to be dissapointed when predators eat all your friendly minnow pets.

Thanks for the tip Bill, I can't wait to try this! Those are your babies in the video. I trapped some minnows a couple of weeks ago and I got both BN and SFM but only the SFM will take food from my hand. It looks like the SFM's out number the BNM's but there were more BNM's in my trap (maybe they like bread more than the SFM's). Is there a way to tell which I have more of?

Now you can see the color of my water, still no sechi disk but my hand disappears around 10 inches. The water looks good though, no scum or anything else. I do need some plants, my hyacinth plants recently died (failed experiment) and with the decreased visibility nothing has grown. I need some cover for my minnows! Getting excited to get my predators, about a month away.

Actually, there are SO many minnows right now that I'm anxious to thin the herd. I'm getting so few predators that I don't think they will put too big a dent in them for a while.

I can't feed the predators from my hand because then I won't want to eat them. That's what happened when I had LMB .

I've been feeding my minnows also for a few days now and they are hanging around in droves. I feed cheap dry dog food pellets. I tried to make pellets smaller using a food processor but I got dust and large pellets so it didn't work so well. But the minnows still devoured the dust and the whole pellets but they had to work at it. My dog Dolly watches the minnows eat the pellets then she starts taking the food away from them and eats it herself. Usually she won't touch dry dog food.