Thanks!
First of all I'm not an "eel expert". Truth is we found it at a local FEED STORE and thought it didn't stand a chance if it stayed there. They assured us that it was eating
frozen krill and yada, yada, disbelief. We bought it and took it home. It didn't eat for a few weeks, until I found out it likes guppies. I finally switched it from guppies to frozen smelt which is much cheaper and available at the grocery store in a large bag.
It's a pretty well documented eel, although there's mucho conflicting information. The LFS will tell you they're easy to keep, blah, blah. The "books" say 50% survival rate, pretty hard top keep and feeds on anything smaller than it's mouth. It has razor sharp teeth and is supposed to have an unsanitary mouth, so don't handfeed to reduce the risk of accidental biting and infection....
My expirience with this one eel is that it likes to sleep all day behind the rocks, comes out at 3:00p and starts looking for food. They feed by smell (hence the fans on the nose) and have very poor eyesight, so IMHO the odor of the food is the key point to getting it to eat. Our eel will not flinch when I add brine/krill/phyto but if a drop of juice from the smelt hits the water he starts 'looking'. Other than smelt, it only "tries" to eat the black and white damsels however once it gets close enough to 'see/smell' the damsel, it immediately looks elsewhere. I feed it 1" x 1/2" x 1/2" thawed smelt chunks w/out the spine once every other day or if I see him 'looking' at the damsels funny.
The only other thing I heard is that ours is very young, due to it's color dispite being close to 3.75 feet long as of last night. Apparently they start out black/yellow then turn deep blue/yellow then turn light blue/yellow and then green/yellow. Ours is a deep blue. Another BRE at the LFS is much lighter blue than ours, which is what sparked the conversation.
Hope that helps. Don't take this as gospel as it's info I collected from people and books, but I haven't really researched deeply. Things I don't know but would like to know are the life span of a the eel, and the time between color changes.
Later!
-Rich
