Daryl said that her fry find the gel food pretty well after 3-4 days. I am wondering, as mine don't care to touch the stuff, how do you get them to eat it? I don't want to reduce their other feedings too much for fear of starving and killing/stunting some of them. At most I have seen one fry hovering nearby, but never eating the food. There have however been a day or two when I was gone for 8 hours or so, and the gel food was still not touched.

I do know the older fish eat it as I put a piece in there to make sure they liked it.

First, and foremost, fry are SOOOOO little that it is difficult to see them eating anything - with the exception of "marker" food such as orange/pink brine shrimp. I have terrible eyes, yes, but I think it is tough for most to see those tiny tiny things and determine whether or not their tummies are full.

I have recently come into GREAT respect for those who have successfully raised just a few fry. I have always had 100s if not 1000s to deal with. This latest hatch is 2. That is right. 2. It is IMPOSSIBLE to make sure that they are eating regularly. It is very difficult to even FIND them to make sure they still exist. Raising just a few is a whole lot harder than raising thousands.

That said, they DO seem to be eating the gel food I put in. I started by hatching baby brine shrimp, but when I pulled out the breeding grass and only found 2 fry, I stopped. It was not worth it. I then tried dropping in small pieces of frozen bbshrimp. I suppose they were eating them, but I could not tell or see, and I was getting messy water very quickly. I decided there had to be a better way.

I resorted to the gel food for these two fry. It is successful - and both have tripled in size (that is not saying much - they are still tiny tiny tiny - but one is big enough to find rather quickly in the water, now!).

I mix up 2tsp freshly hatched baby brine shrimp with 2 T ground fish flakes, a bit of spiriliana flake sifted "dust", 4T water and 1 package of gel. This is cut in 1/4 inch cubes. A single cube will feed 25-50 fry for a day when they are under 2 weeks of age. If you only have a few fry, you may never even see what they eat. Look at those little things. They are barely more than a line and a dot - their tummies are smaller still. They need a steady supply of food through the day - but not much. Take the cube out at the end of the day if it is left.

I bet yours are eating. They are not dying, right?

Oh they are eating, they just seem to prefer the bbs over the gel food. Usually everyone's tummues are that bright pinkish orange...the color of the bbs. I have never had a large group of fry (btw, I think I found out why this morning) this batch is between 20-25 fry, so far no one has died. I can tell they are eating more now than they did at the beginning of the week because the bbs do not last nearly as long at the bottom of their tub.

So I suppose I will continue to add the gel food daily and hope to transfer mainly to that once the little guys grow up some more. In the meantime they will still get bbs meals, since that gets scattered pretty evenly in the tub and they all can find them.

I have decided that in order to train them into finding the gel food I am going to start restricting where the bbs gets spread to in the tank. All the fry have learned to hang out towards the bottom because inevtiably that is where all the food ends up. So starting at their last feeding today I only distributed the frozen bbs in half of their tub. Already all but one of the fry have moved over to that half. In the next few days I will keep reducing the area of food till it is only by the place I put the gel food every day.

I am hoping this encourages them to find the other food source and start taking advantage of it too.

I use live bbshrimp - and the switch to sinking frozen Daphnia is a BIG one for fry. All of a sudden, they need to look on the bottom, where before, it was swimming around in front of them.

I think you have a good idea. It takes patience and consistancy to "train" a fish - but it does work.