How to get Banded Pipefish to eat?

[Mangodude]

I have the chance to buy banded pipefish and I'd love to give them a try but I want to know what they eat first.

The banded ones they have in are Doryrhamphus dactylophorus.

Thank you

[namxas]

Pipes, like SH, eat pods and small shrimp, such as small ghosties. They will eat every pod in your tank in short order (we had a pair of D. janssi wipe out a teeming fuge, but it got them over the hump so we could wean them).

You'll eventually want to get your pipes weaned onto frozen mysis. Buy the brands that look like whole shrimp, and not the brands that are typically pieces (Hikari and PE are good brands, but PE are pretty large as far as myis go).

If you have berried female peppermint shrimp, they will likely engage in an interesting behavior...they can actually pick the roe off of the shrimp without harming the shrimp...it's pretty weird to see.

HTH

[tjdouglas]

Dear Eric, I have had a pair for two years that eat Hikari mysis (it's smaller than PE mysis). But I had a pair before these that simply refused to eat anything and wasted away. Afraid that in my experience it seemed a bit hit and miss as to whether or not banded pipefish will switch to frozen food.

Do you have access to live brine shrimp? If you gut-load live brine shrimp and throw in thawed mysis with the live brine feeding they might make the switch more readily.

[MrsHavoc]

I got min e when they were young, I didn't rinse hikari small mysis, they ate all the small pieces and now moved to regular eating the smaller shimp while my pomies go for the bigger ones.

[Mangodude]

I can hatch brine shrimp if I need to, I've never tried gut loading them though.

And thank you for the advice on the hikari, I used to keep a lot of that around, all the fish loved it.

[tjdouglas]

Gut-loading brine shrimp simply involves adding a supplement to their water to enrich them for several hours before feeding them to your fish. Some folks use some form of phytoplankton...other use a supplement like Selcon or Zoecon or Dan's Feed (from Seahorse Source).

[rayjay]

To fully enrich bbs, you need to grow them for about a day after hatching until they reach the second instar stage where they now have a digestive system.
It is not there in stage I.
You can gut load them in about 12 hours, but it's much better to do two 12 hour stages with new water and enrichment for each stage, as they will then have assimilated the enrichment into their bodies making them now enriched instead of just gut loaded.
As brine shrimp progress through their molts and become larger, they take less time to gut load/enrich so that ADULTS can be gut loaded in two to three hours (min) and can be enriched in 6 to 8 hours.

[namxas]

If you get the pipes from the LFS look them over well, and try not to get overly skinny specimens, as they will likely die before you get them eating. Like SH, pipes lack a true stomach, and can't hold food for digestion, so if they've been off there feed for more than a few days, you may never get them back. Better yet, get some that you can see eating.

[rlpardue]

Nutrimar Ova is a likely frozen food they would eat. It's about the smallest frozen food you can get.

[tvoydan]

My would eat Hikari mysis. They just slowly started eating it after the pop population dropped. Problem was polluting the water getting them to make the switch. Had to vacuum out the excess until they got the idea.

[GratefulReef]

I have a banded pipefish, and along with my great pod population I also supplement with brightwell aquatics microvore. I have had the pipefish now for 4 months and its active and healthy looking.