Lionfish wont eat

Hi I just purchased a Lionfish about 4 days ago and it is not eating!! I got it the day it arrived at the store and have a warranty on him just incase something bad happens(which I don't want it to). I have tried frozen mysis, frozen silversides and very tiny goldfish, the goldfish even touch him on his head and he looks the other way! What can I get that would be a sure fire way to make this guy eat.

 

he might be stressed out i madce sure mine was eating before i bought him. you could try freshwater glass shrimp escecially if he is small. how you figure something out
good luck

 

Go get some feeder commets at your lfs and try that. Although its not good for them in the long run it will get them going. I have 2 lions and they eat a ton of goldfish until I could convert them to shrimp. There is a lady local to me that catches ghost shrinp and I get alot of those live and they love those! I would try some goldfish they will live for about 20 minutes in the tank so its got time to see it moving around.

 

definately need to feed it live to start, esp if he just arrived at the store. Goldfish are BAD to feed. You need to get ghost shrimp and gut soak the shrimp with HUFA's (get shrimp, and feed shrimp food that is soaked in HUFA's) I used to do that in addition to right before feeding them, putting the shrimp in a glass of saltwater and adding some Amino-Omega from Brightwell directly to the water.

Will probably have to do this for a while to get the fish eating. Then you can move onto things like frozen krill or silversides. What you will want to do at that time, is get a feeding stick (I use a wooden kaboob skewer) and place the whole krill on the tip of the stick and make the krill look as if it is "swimming". This will take several days to weeks to get it to take the frozen food, so you will have to feed live during this time.

I got one of my lions to eat frozen within a couple days, another one took a couple months...so patience and luck is the key. I always used the feeding sticks even after the fish was readiily taking the frozen.

You can also add some garlic extract to your frozen food mixture

What I have done in the past (with the lions and frog fish) is get some mollys and acclimate them to saltwater. That way I had stock of fish on hand that I could drop right into their tanks and not just kill the fish off in 30 min or so. They would swim around the tank and overnight they would be ate. Also, mollies reproduce like bunnies in saltwater conditons. I was able to monitor the health of the fish and they were always gut loaded at all times because they ate the same quality food that I fed my reef tank. I got a 10g tank with a cheap HOB filter, put some plastic greenery in for the babies to hid, and kept the mollies in there.

 

Lionfish ate

I went to the store and found some ghost shrimp and he immediately ran over to it and ate it up in the blink of an eye so I fed him 2 and he seemed content. Thanks for the info guys!

 

OK, good to hear he's eating.

 

Mine did the same thing and after a week i was "hand feeding" it thawed Krill ,silvers and whatever else i would give him.