longnose butterfly not eating...please help!

[seanoman]

michika- no luck with the nori yet... I'm not sure if it's really even noticed it either though, as it's on the opposite side of that tank from where it usually swims.

[Delphinus]

Pretty much. I just get it cracked open enough that he can get his proboscis (or whatever it's called - his "snout" ) into the shell and he goes to town. Now that I freeze them they pretty much open all the way though.

I'm not 100% convinced Cyclops-eeze will do the trick. It might, most fish love the smell of it. I know my CBB goes berserk when I feed it to my tank but it seems to me that among my fish, it's mostly just my tang and my rabbitfish who are able to vacuum it down. My butterfly seems to need to strike at something to be able to eat it. I don't know if that holds for all butterflies. I guess the thing to do though is try Cyclops, if he eats it then great. If he seems to react to it but can't eat it - then try soaking some cyclops and mysis together to see if the taste transfers. Likely, what has to happen is he has to eat some mysis by accident and then discover that he actually really likes it.

Good luck!

[seanoman]

cool that sounds good. I will give it a try when I get home and see if it goes for it. If not, I'll be off to the grocery store in search of some clams. I'll post later tonight on it's progress

[seanoman]

So things are looking much better I think. We got home today and tried the cyclopeeze...didn't do the trick. A little while later I threw in a cube of frozen mysis that I soaked in cyclopeeze...still not working. We went out and bought some clams as Delphinius suggested, and threw one in. It didn't seem interested at first so we left it alone and checked back about an hour later. The clam was moved around and was partially eaten. We're not sure if that was our regal or the butterfly but it was behaving differently and was checking out the rest of the tank for the first time, instead of staying in the one corner. We went out for the evening and when we came back, our whole sheet of nori was gone also...I know our regal is a little piggy but I don't think that it would have eaten an entire sheet of nori to itself! I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that it's been eating.