I'll be leaving for vacation in about 2 weeks (8 Day Vacation) and figured this is the perfect opportunity to get a few of my cichlids (namely my Pike) off freeze-dried junk food and onto NLS pellets.

I've tried the starvation method, but I've got a soft spot for the little guy and I never push it even close to far enough to be successful. I figure this vacation is the perfect opportunity to get him nice and hungry before introducing the NLS pellets.

This approach should take the problem (me) out of the picture long enough to make some progress.

Good Luck 5x5! I hope it works out for ya!

I'm fortunate enough that all my cichlids have fed off of pelleted food from day one! Even my dicrossus female and laetacara curviceps will eat flakes!

It does seem like the best method to get a picky eater to eat, I've often seen that method applied to picky snakes, like ball pythons, to switch them from live to frozen mice.

Send that snakey looking over by me for the summer, I'll toughen him up and send him back a fire breathing monster.

I don't have any snakes anymore, had to give them up when i had lost my job 2 years ago cause i couldn't afford them haha But at the store i used to work for, I always had problems with our ball pythons not eating frozen mice. And we didn't have any live mice...it would get frustrating at times

Not having much luck yet. The Pike seems to be sucking in the pellets now, but then he spits them back out. I'll try for a few more days and see if he'll finally swallow them.
Maybe he just hates garlic!

I would go Petco and pick up a small jar of general or cichlid formula NLS and try that, I've had fish reject the mega dose of garlic in Thera. It won't go to waste since everyone else will eat it just the same.

Well any success yet or is mysis shrimp and bloodworms forever?

The only progress I've made is that he'll attempt to eat the pellets, but he shoots them out in disgust. I stopped feeding bloodworms, so the current diet is mysis, brine and tubifex.

I've made some progress, the pike will "half eat" pellets. After weeks of feeding schrimp very sparingly, he has become more interesting in eating the NLS pellets. Oddly, he'll only try the 4.5mm and avoids anything smaller.

What I mean by "half" eat them, is that he'll chew them and spit out about half the pellet.

Well that's some sort of progress.