It's a strange timeline of events that started at the end of May with my wife and I salvaging RES out of our pasture after heavy rains that washed them and thousands of BF tadpoles out of the pond. 28 larger RES and 40 smaller RES were initially salvaged over several days. Since then they were graded by size and put in two different tanks. I have traded the smaller ones away for a variety of small pellets to try out and have added some additional larger RES from seining on two different occasions a few weeks apart. Adding more RES to my bigger tank without increasing the amount of bloodworms they were fed kind of forced them to start eating pellets or go hungry, it also made them more food competitive.
Here is what they have been fed, I started with frozen bloodworms and mini slow sinking cichlid pellets that I picked up at the pet store. At first very few of them would eat pellets, mostly they took turns sucking them in and spitting them out until they hit the bottom of the tank. After trading the smaller RES away I started using AM300 which they like much better than the pet store pellets even though they are the same size. I am also grinding AM500 in a coffee bean grinder and sorting out the larger chunks and now mixing it in with the bloodworms they get. I have been slowly decreasing the amount of bloodworms they get daily and increasing the pellet chunks in their twice a day bloodworm treat. I started giving them sliced up night crawlers two weeks ago in part to get the super agressive eaters something in their stomach so the less agreesive eaters had more of chance to eat some of the bloodworms and pellets, it seems to have worked.
I also have 16 smaller RES from my last seining two weeks ago that are getting micro pellets and the smaller coffee bean ground stuff. They seem to eat the ground stuff better than the micro pellets even though the micro pellets are higher in protein.
