Dear Tasha:
Yikes — it sounds like your friend has been getting some bad device from the guys at the LFS! As a rule, seahorses will have no interest whatsoever in eating flake food. They will not swim up to take flake food floating at the surface, they normally do not slurp up flake food after it has settled on the bottom, and they will not swim after flake food to eat it in midwater. By and large they do not recognize flake food as edible, and most of the flake food is too large for a seahorse’s tube mouth to ingest. The best outcome you could hope for my offering flake food to seahorses is that they might eat a few of the smallest crumbs that happen to drift right by their snouts where they are perched. The vast majority of the flake food is going to go uneaten and degrade the water quality in the aquarium. So tell your friend to avoid using any type of flake food for her seahorses.
If the seahorses will eat the freeze dried krill and plankton readily: then that’s fine and can be used occasionally to diversify their diet. But frozen Mysis should serve as their staple, everyday diet. Frozen Mysis as a natural prey item for the seahorses, it’s readily available from any LFS in a number of brands, the seahorses recognize the Mysis as a natural food source and eat it very well, and frozen Mysis enriched with Vibrance provides them with a diet designed specifically by fish nutritionists to meet all of the seahorse’s long-term dietary needs.
The next lesson in your training course (Lesson 5) is devoted entirely to feeding seahorses with frozen Mysis, Tasha, and it will tell you everything you need to know on that subject. Look for in your inbox later today and feel free to pass the information along to your friend, if you wish.
In fact, your friend is welcome to join the Ocean Rider training program for new seahorse keepers as well, Tasha (we don’t want to leave for in the hands of the guys from her LFS who are using flake food as the primary diet for their seahorses.) Just have her contact me ([email protected]) with her full name and I will get her started on the training program right away!
Best wishes with all your fishes, Tasha!
Respectfully,
Pete Giwojna
Ocean Rider, Inc. is an Organic Hawaiian-Based Seahorse Aqua-Farm & Aquarium that Follows Strict Good Farming Practices in Raising Seahorses and Other Aquatic Life.
