Well I'm just not sure what to do at this point. He's still alive, but he's still not hunting. at all. The Codfather was awesome sauce and brought me a bag full of the large sized amphipods. Combined with a fresh mat of algae from my overflow rife with the small kind of copepods and small mysid shrimp, this guy's tank is loaded with living food. He doesn't appear to have eaten a single thing in the first 3 days (which has now all be thrown out according to the TT protocol), and this morning when I did the transfer, I was able to simply scoop him up with my hands. He barely even tried to escape.
at lights out tonight, there was a large sized amphipod hanging out on the side of his face, with no seeming reaction from the fish.
He's still looking around, and every few minutes he'll change position, but he seems far more concerned with finding a sheltered place to hide than 'hunting' anything.
Question to all you experienced folk out there - if you were me, would you continue with this rather labour intensive QT protocol hoping that suddenly he'd start eating live food, or would you look in to one of the human euthanasia techniques for sick fish? I can keep going and put him in my DT when this is done because I have faith that this QT protocol will clear him of the kinds of parasites I'm trying to avoid (I'm also now treating with prazipro), but if he goes in to display only to die of starvation in a week, I'm not sure if I'm doing him, or the rest of my fish any favours. From my reading it looks like death by starvation (assuming no other internal organs are damaged) takes months for these fish, and even thinking about that makes me queasy. It would be one thing if it simply wouldn't accept frozen food, as I am capable of working with that, but not eating anything at all, even if it's exactly what it would be hunting in the wild, live and right in front of it's face, seems to me like there's very little hope for it.
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