Update
Sorry, no video yet :? but coming soon, promise! (I need hubby to film while I feed and he's been busy with work)
For those of you thinking about getting a fire eel, after only 1 week of having mine I love it! and recommend it 100% (just in case I didn't make that clear in my previous posts, lol). It is by far the smartest fish I have. Kraken will now "let me know" when he is hungry by coming up all the way to the top when I open the tank's canopy (before I had to put my hand about 6in down and wiggle the worm, now he comes straight up and needs no enticement to come close to my hand, the down side is that my leaf fish are starting to take the worms too and I would rather save them for kraken). So far I have been feeding him 6 small earthworms daily, he will still "beg" for more but his belly looks pretty full and I don't want to overfeed him. He now takes food from the inside of my hand.
To other fire eel keepers:
-How much do you feed your eel?
-Does 5-6 small earthworms for a 7-8inch fire eel seem excessive? I pretty much feed mine until I can see its belly start to get round.
-Any recommendations on how to switch to frozen foods (ie beef heart)? So far Kraken is only interested in live food, any frozen food dropped into the tank gets ignored long enough that my other fish get to it. The plan is to, once kraken has a stronger association that hand contains food, to feed thawed beefheart and see if he takes it. I would love to know how other people achieved this switch.
Thanks for reading
Edit: I forget where I read this (probably some biology class I had), but I read that predators are smarter than herbivores because they need to hunt for their food. Between kraken and the leaf fish I am taking it as confirmation that predators learn food associations faster which I think is pretty cool - who knew, evolution works! (yeah yeah I know, I am making a pretty big generalization based on a very small sampling population so no Nature or Science papers for me (PS: if you get that joke, you're a nerd like me
))