Any hope of persuading a CBB to take non-mysis foods?

[Ruth]

Tony - no experience with a CBB but I do have a huge a$$ Naso tang and all he eats is nori and occassionally I put some grape calurpa in the tank. That's it - he won't touch anything floating in the water column, no clams, no spiralina(sp), no homemade goop, pellets - nothing else. Short of force feeding him somehow that's his diet. I've had him for over a year and he is fat and has good colour but I know that I worry about his limited diet. I thought of maybe going snorkelling in the tank and showing him (jk) but every other fish in that tank with the exception of the Conspic Angel eat out of the water column and eat a variety of food.
Sorry no suggestions but maybe your PVC idea will work.

[marie]

Ruth, all my naso would eat for the first 1 1/2 was nori and then right out of the blue one day he started eating flake, from then on he would eat anything that I put in the tank.

[Ruth]

Thanks Marie. There may yet be hope for my guy. My completely unproven theory is that as he was large when I got him and has gotten even larger in the past year plus he was probably older when he was caught so will only eat things that resemble his diet in the wild.

[Chaloupa]

mine eats bloodworms soaked heavily in garlic and vitamins - I know not an ideal diet choice but he samples all frozen foods in the tank and sometimes seems to eat some, plus it will also eat fresh sliced off bits of scallops and of course clam from the local seafood shop

[RD]

So basically so far nobody's saying that they had one that would take flakes or pellets ... I'll take that as a "don't even bother trying" perhaps.

Never say never. From page 2 of the following thread:
http://216.187.96.54/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=29859

When I fed the rest of the tank NLS pellets........ He started eating the pellets like they where crack!

Obviously not an easy species to convert to pellet foods, but at least in some cases it can be done.

HTH

[Delphinus]

I did seriously give it a try and I do feed pellet in every few days so if he ever changes his mind, it's there for him.

I have a Dendrophyllia coral that I feed mysis to and he is fully aware that if I feed that coral, he can steal the food from there. So sometimes I will feed the coral the NLS pellets as it eats just about anything and the CBB will try to steal the food, thinking that its mysis.

However he spits it out every time! He simply will not touch anything that's been dried.

I've resorted to putting in a mussel, clam or oyster every now and again so that he has something else to eat besides mysis. Starting to get used to the strange looks at the seafood counter when I ask for "one mussel please."

I tried frozen clams but he won't even touch those. He will, however, eat the formerly-live ones I buy from the supermarket.

If there's a trick to getting them to broaden their tastes I'd love to hear it. Unfortunately I'm not very good at deliberately starving fish in order to get them to try something new. In this case I don't hold out a lot of hope it would work anyhow, he has a very strong will.

[Tarolisol]

My CBB after consuming every aptasia in my tank ate mysis as well as nori. Never touched a coral. He was perfect. Then he sucumbed to the sucking action of a vortech.