How much pellet food for tiny, inactive fish?

[Tired]

I have two fish in a QT tank for ich treatment, and am therefore trying to avoid feeding more than they need. I recognize that "how much should I feed these fish" is an odd question to be asking a couple years into keeping the aquarium, but what I've been doing up until now is letting them catch their own food from the pods in the tank. I feed them a couple times a week, a mysis shrimp apiece, and they stay fat and happy. No clue how much they eat, but it's clearly enough. 

 

So I'm not sure how much pellet food to give them. I can't do the whole "see how much they eat in 5 minutes" thing, because they'll both only take the pellets if I give them one at a time. And I know for a fact that they'll eat a much larger meal than they need, because they'll eat until their stomachs bulge if they get an opportunity. 

 

One fish is a trimma goby, an inch long. The other is a roughhead blenny, akin to a mini barnacle blenny, very slightly over an inch long. Neither is active- they both just sit in one place. I'm feeding a tiny NLS pellet, about a millimeter across. Does anyone have a decent estimate of how many pellets they should get per day? 

 

I'm hoping to get some mosquito larvae to use as live food, but it's not quite mosquito season yet, and I'm also not sure the mosquito larvae will live very long with the water movement from the filter. There aren't any tiny brackish-water feeders readily available, are there? I'm doing a hyposalinity treatment, so, as far as I know, any pods I seed will die off pretty fast. 

[DaJMasta]

Pods are much more adaptable than most larger crustaceans to different salinities, and many actually culture better at lower salinities.  That said, copper based ich medications will also kill them, like most inverts.

 

My approach would be more along the lines of feed extra, then remove after a bit and see how much they want.  I've found that the minimum to keep a fish going is often not much, but then they also aren't going to be at their peak immune system capacity, so letting them eat their fill is my usual choice.  Often, this means they could eat what you think is a normal sized portion for them several times a day, and I've seen fish that can barely even fit a mysis or a big bloodworm in their mouth go for them and then work on swallowing it until they do, as well as seen stomachs bulge in the shape of the food they ate just trying to pack it in.

The advantage with a quarantine tank is that no substrate or detritus really means that it's easy to see if they ate and easy to clean up - a bit of baster usage or a bit of airline tubing to siphon should be plenty to clean up after half an hour or so to let them pick at it.

[Tired]

Hm, I might try adding some pods, then. Any idea which species will do best? I have lots of amphipods in a culture/storage tank, if those might work. That would be ideal, since I wouldn't have to worry as much about getting them fed. 

Heck, do bristleworms tolerate brackish water? Or ceriths? I could plonk one of them in to scavenge. 

 

It's not a severe ich infection, it's one of those "pops up for a few days and then goes incognito again" ones, so I'm trying just hyposalinity. Partly because I'm wary of copper with the roughhead blenny; she's got a finicky appetite on the best of days, and is an obscure enough fish that I can't find anything on how she'll do with copper. 

 

I'd love to try that approach of letting them eat on their own time, but both fish will only eat pellets that are in midwater. They won't take anything that isn't either moving in midwater or crawling on the ground. I've been dropping the pellets basically on their little heads to get them to eat. At least the blenny has realized they're food; used to be I had to drop the pellets at a specific angle to her, so she'd see them out the side of her eye and strike. 

 

Since there's no medication to worry about, the tank isn't completely bare. I added a handful of that ceramic donut media that comes with canister filters, a few shells and bits from my reef to hopefully transfer some biofilter, and a species of thin chaeto that does fine anywhere from brackish to saltwater. Also some hair algae that does fine from brackish to saltwater, that came on the chaeto. 

[DaJMasta]

The midwater fish I've kept always like frozen best, but a slow falling, smaller pellet may do the job (TDO B2 is a good one I feed my banggai fry).

 

Worth mentioning that the tank transfer method may be a simpler choice in some ways - with very small fish, you can literally do it in buckets, and then you're doing a full water change every 3 days anyways.  I did an ich treatment using the TTM of a sharknose goby in 2.5g buckets with a heater and a sponge filter, worked great and very low maintenance.  I just gave him a squirt of the main tank's food each day and it seemed to be sufficient (though they're probably easier to feed than your fish).

 

A lot of snails should be ok, and depending on how low you're running the salinity, it may not even qualify as proper brackish.  A lot of brackish animals are closer to half the salinity of the ocean, and anything above maybe 25ppt is probably better considered just saltwater.  While ceriths or bristleworms may be alright, the snail that comes to mind is nerites, since they need fresh/brackish to reproduce and are commonly sold and used in freshwater aquaria.

[Tired]

Both fish are happily taking the pellet food I'm giving them, if I give it to them a piece at a time so they can eat it from midwater. They'll also take frozen, but it's easier for me to keep up with feeding them if the food isn't downstairs in the kitchen freezer. I've got them eating, I just don't know how much they need. Maybe I'll get them to gorge on frozen every few days to help make sure they're getting enough calories.

 

Oh, right, TTM is an option. I'm not sure it would be good for these guys, though- the trimma goby in particular won't eat for a day or so after being moved. I'm trying not to stress them out, partly because I'm trying to keep the ich from getting the upper hand. 

 

I'm following the method here, https://humble.fish/hyposalinity/ , which has the salinity being lowered to 1.009. Maybe I'll try and acclimate a cerith. I don't think nerites will eat dropped food. I should definitely try acclimating some amphipods, thanks for that idea. I guess the question is if they're closer to the ich or to the fish in regards to how they handle this, since the ich, hopefully, will be killed by the lowered salinity. I know there's a strain that can tolerate it, but this seems like the least stressful possible treatment, so I figured I'd give it a shot first.