SNowflake eel companions?

[coryjac0b]

just got me a snowflake eel about a week ago, and i am now wondering what companions do some of you have out there, or what do you think would be good companions, LFS said maybe a trigger, and/or a puffer.

[wrasser]

As long as the fish are bigger than the snowflakes mouth you are ok, IME, if the eel can eat it it will. At night it will eaqt the fish it can fit in its mouth. I fed mine evey third day, three to four silver sides,and it still ate the small fish. IME tangs, dawrf angles, triggers, and most wrasse lived through the time i had my eel.

[redpaulhus]

I've found that if you buy a young, small snowflake, and keep it on its natural diet of crustaceans NOT FISH they will be less likely to turn on tankmates - the teeth of snowflakes are designed to crush crabs, shrimp, and other shellfish, not grab fish.

I feed them krill, scallop, clam, shrimp, crabmeat, squid, Formula One, and occasional live glass shrimps or fiddler crabs. Occasionally I will soak freeze-dried shrimp in Selcon or similar HUFA suppliments and offer them instead. (the grass shrimp are gut loaded on a high HUFA flake food) Most of the food I impale on a long piece of rigid airline tubing (feeding stick).

After conditioning eels this way I generally still keep them with the fishes that wrasser mentioned - angels, wrasses, small groupers, hamlets, larger hawkfishes, etc.

However, a few of my service clients have put chromis or damsels in with well-trained, well-fed snowflakes with fair results - ie a 20", nice thick snowflake only ate one of about a dozen chromis over about a years time (we think the eel ate the chromis, it "disappeared").

I would definately avoid small substrate oriented fishes such as gobies even with a well fed eel that has never tasted fish, but with proper diet you might (eventually - a few years down the road) be able to sneak a few smaller upper water column fishes in.

On the other hand - I have had a few service clients who insisted on feeding silversides and/or feeder fish to thier snowflakes, and the eels seemed much more aggressive with their tankmates. They also tended to be less colorfull (the yellow is less bright).

[Fishfirst]

Selecting fish companions also depends on your tank size... What size is the tank?

[coryjac0b]

the tank is 55g, i tried feeding him live grass, but hes not interested, then itried the krill, and he sucked the pieces right up.

[Fishfirst]

Pardon, live grass? like you get from your lawn? hmmm never heard of it being fed to a snowflake eel. Anyway, you will be limited to what else you can have in there considering they get fairly large and are a large bioload. Maybe a fuzzy dwarf lion? Not completely sure if its compatible or not, we'll have to see what the old salt says.

[redpaulhus]

Live grass shrimp I think

assuming the tank is stocked slowly, has proper biological filtration, a good skimmer, etc, I'd look at hawkfishes, hamlets, a dwarf lion, mid-sized wrasses (lunare, etc) etc.

[coryjac0b]

well i got his first friend today, a 7 inch digface puffer, kinda funny how he doesnt actually eat, or kill the hermit crabs, just pickes them up, swims away, and drops them.

[wrasser]

Hey you know, my blue hippo does that too. I wonder why differnt fish do that?

[Fishfirst]

just be sure he doesn't figure out how to pick them up and flip them while he's "entertaining himself" he might find it nice to get a snack while he plays.

[coryjac0b]

thats what the guy at the LFS said, "I hope your not attached to your hermit crabs."

[wrasser]

If you feed a CROCODILE chickens all of its life does that mean it wont eat YOU?

[redpaulhus]

Depends on the Crock

I like to base my feeding regime and recommendations on a combination of the animals morphology, studies of wild behavior, wild gut content analysis (when available), and personal experience.

When you are dealing with a wild caught animal, early prey imprinting can be very important - this is a very common topic amonst reptile keepers, for example - many wild caught snakes will imprint on certain prey items and can be difficult to wean onto other prey.

I've seen this happen with a number of fishes, both freshwater and marine. If I feed them a primarily non-piscene diet, I generally see lower aggression levels and a lower incidence of interspecies predation.

Predators that I feed comets\tuffies\guppies or frozen silversides tend to be more likely to see their tankmates as prey - probably due to similar visual, behavioral, and olfactory cues.

A natural crustacean predator who is constantly fed fish is going to learn to prefer fish - kind of like we Americans who have learned to prefer a fast cheeseburger or pizza because we've been eating them since we were kids

[TheOldSalt]

A dogface that doesn't eat hermits? Hmm... well, I wouldn't count on THAT lasting much longer. Maybe he just can't get a big enough grip yet.

The puffer is in no danger from the eel, but I'm not so sure the reverse is true. Those darn puffers have such individual personalities, and that makes it hard to predict what any given specimen is going to do, but I've seen plenty of fish get mauled by puffers.

As for a dwarf lion, that's a definite maybe. I've seen lions try to eat small eels head-first a few times, and while they were never successful, the eels were badly injured.

Most snowflakes seem to prefer shrimp, especially when they first come in, but since most people try to feed them fish as a matter of convenience, they learn to prefer fish. This is especially true of the smaller eels which are most typically seen in stores, because feeder guppies seem like a better fit than shrimp. I guess that's already been covered, though.

I don't really have anything more to add. If you want your eels to eat grass shrimp, then don't offer it anything else until it gets the clue. I personally break off the rostrums first to avoid injury to the eel ( or whatever ), and like redpaul already said, feeding good food to the shrimp will make them in turn better food. To make them more appealing, you could smush them up a bit so they're nice and oozy, and thusly smell better.

Since snowflakes are so easy to train to eat from your fingers, ( and can become something of a real pet ) it won't tank long for it to figure out that anything you are wiggling toward it is food. It should grab any offered shrimp after awhile, even if only to play tug-of-war with you, and eventually it'll start eating the shrimp.
After that, of course, no shrimp in the tank will be safe.

By the way, eels can, and often will, go a distressingly long time without eating. This is usually nothing to worry about, although it can be pretty worrying.

Oh, one last thing; snowflake bites aren't anything to worry about when they are young, and they don't even hurt, so don't worry about that part. The thing to worry about it abrading the eel's skin. While it's fun to play with them, and they like to play, this is really a bad idea because you're exposing them to undue risk. Just feed them, and maybe play a bit of tug-of-war, but don't let them climb up your arm or anything.