How long can clownfish go without eating?
Are you worried about your clown buddies because you are going on vacation? Is it bothering you how long would your clownfish survive without having anything to eat? Well, do not worry, go and enjoy your off days with your sweetie.
They can easily go a week without eating anything. Two weeks wouldn’t be surprising either. Despite this fact, it’s not recommended to have them hungry for that long when you can make accommodations to have them eat. For example, you can ask your neighbor to take care of their feeding. But an inexperienced neighbor would more likely create a mess with this. So, just a couple of small feeding would serve the purpose excellently for a week or so.
If this is not possible, you can go for auto-feeding. Auto-feeders installed at the aquarium top are contained with the reserve foods like flakes and pellets. They drop a specific amount of food at specific intervals of time, thus making sure your clowns are not food-deprived all this time you being out.
Coming back to the bearability, the wild-caught individuals are far more resilient than captive-bred varieties. The wild specimen can even go one month and would still thrive. Anyhow, the best would still be making some arrangements for their feeding while you enjoy your days out.
How often should you feed clownfish?
Although it’s safe to say that they can go without eating for at least a week, however, it shouldn’t be common practice to keep them this hungry. Ideally, the clowns are best kept on two feedings a day but to have them spawn and breed you need to feed them more often.
They are omnivorous feeders which makes them voracious eaters in your tank. To keep their nutritional needs up to par, you need to have a keen eye on the nutritional values that your fish food is going to provide. Ideally, flakes and pellets in the morning and frozen foods like a mixture of Mysis and brine shrimp and rods food in the evening account for the best clownfish diet.
Small feedings that your clowns can finish within two minutes two to three times a day are a perfect treat you can feasibly offer to your handsome clown friends. Frozen foods and occasional vegetable treats are known to induce spawning in these fish. So, if you intend to have them breed, increase the number of usual feedings plus add more varied nutrition to their diet.
Why are clownfish suddenly not eating?
Rejecting the foods or not showing interest in feedings is not uncommon for the clownfish. As far as the data on the internet suggests, almost every clownfish owner faces this problem of clownfish not eating at some point of their acquisition period. So, this is not something to worry about unless aquarium parameters do not meet the optimum levels.
There are times when everything seems perfect, but the clownfish suddenly stops eating. When this happens try to rule out the possibilities of negative aquarium fluctuations. Once ruled out, try to look for the disease. Your fish might be suffering from some illness. An ill fish should be isolated in a quarantine tank and offer small amounts of high-quality frozen foods directly to them. Stop flakes or pellets for a while. Meaty food will help to boost fish’s appetite.
Another possibility is that if you have just started the tank and bring clownfish in there to speed up the cycling process, it may also go wrong for your fish, not only in terms of feeding but also in terms of its overall well-being. However, the introduction of clownfish into a fully cycled prominently running tank may also pose this problem, but it will only last until it acclimatizes to the new home.
There is another thing that needs to be addressed here and that’s the thing that put a lot of aquarists into thinking that there something really bad happening to their clownfish if they suddenly stop eating, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes everything is fine, and the fish do not exhibit any symptoms of the disease, but they simply don’t seem to be eating. There are two situations here: They may simply don’t like to eat, or they may have been eating without you noticing it. So, just keep calm and keep an eye on aquarium parameters.
How do I get my clownfish to eat?
To get new clownfish to eat may seem to be as tricky as it is to get an already acquired clownfish back to feeding after he stops eating. The acclimatization process of the newly acquired clownfish can prove to be quite challenging at times. Especially the wild-caught ones. However, a little bit of the right put-in of the effort can save you from big trouble.
Mostly it is seen that the novice aquarists feed new clownfish with the pellets and flakes right off the bat. But this is something that should be refrained. Pellets and flakes are a part of a dietary staple for clownfish, but the new clownfish being still in the acclimatization process may exhibit rejection tendencies to these commercial foods. Or it’s simply because you are doing it the wrong way. Pellets are often too large and hard for the clownfish to swallow. Make sure you are soaking the pellets before feeding them to your clowns.
Another simple, yet the most overlooked thing is to ask your seller the feedings he had been giving your fish all the time he kept them. For example, the fish being kept on frozen or fresh foods at the breeder or seller place now can’t suddenly switch to pellets and flakes. Keep your fish on frozen well-thawed foods for some time and slowly shift to commercial foods. While your fish is still acclimatizing, make sure to target feed it. You can do it using a pipette. Your fish will start taking the bits of bites and then come will be a point when you would be able to put your fish on the track of diversified feeding.
