So, I recently picked up a Jack Dempsey fish at a local aquarium shop, and for the first two months, I fed the little fella nothing but Wardley sinking pellets. Seemed to suit him just fine. As he got larger, I started supplementing his diet with red runner Turkistan roaches, which I would freeze for twenty minutes to keep them from swimming to freedom, giving the Jack Dempsey time to take them down the moment they hit the water's surface. Unfortunately, I noticed the Jack Dempsey was consuming the pellets less and less, and recently, he doesn't consume them at all. He doesn't seem to care for crickets, and seeing as how I live between two farming estates that use insecticides and herbicides on their property, I'm not comfortable feeding him field collected insects. Earthworms are pretty much the only other thing he eats now. He will react to the pellets, but ultimately, he spits them out. You toss a roach or earthworm into that tank, though, and he will snap it up like a hungry python diving for a mouse. Is this diet going to result in any illness of deficiency or excess? I've tried virtually all cultivated insects, but he doesn't seem especially interested in meal worms, wax worms, grasshoppers, crickets, anything really, other than earthworms and roaches. I've been considering starting up a tank of mosquito fish and starting to offer live fish to him starting next year, so that I can minimize risk of parasites and get a good colony going before I start feeding from it, but I'm a touch worried that I will have set up a fifty gallon tank of feeder gambusias only to have him turn his nose up. Should I be worried? I mean, I use the roaches on my white's tree frog, but he has a rather varied diet, with earthworms, mealworms, crickets, roaches, and the occasional wax worm. Will a lack of variety shorten the life of the Jack Dempsey fish?
T.G.
T.G.