One of the most challenging task for a seahorse keeper is feeding. Seahorse can be very difficult to feed. Some will take frozen readily while others will only eat live food. To add to the difficulty seahorse are very slow eaters.

We came up with an idea how to feed the seahorse. Typically you can dump the brine shrimp in to the tank and hope they swim to the seahorse, they usually swim the other direction. We leave the shrimp in the net and have trained the seahorses to come perch on the net and eat like a horse with a feed bag.
Sometime this does not work, if the shrimp catch the right current the get out of the net.
Other times the shrimp stay at the bottom of the net and the seahorse get every one.

Only one shrimp left!

Lucy will eat freshly chopped ghost shrimp. So we chop up a few shrimp and let her eat them. This is about two days worth of the food for Lucy.

More please…

While the net works, I think I will build a seahorse feed corral similar to Mini’s tank. The seahorse are difficult to feed due to their mental feeding trigger. That is, the instinct that tells them what their are looking at is food. When they are born they start to look for small fry shrimp. And the fry have little wiggle legs the are constantly moving. In the seahorse’s mind if there are no moving legs then it must not be food. Seahorse are not scavengers so it is difficult for them to convert to eating frozen. Mini on the other hand is very young maybe 4 weeks and she eats frozen, fresh and live.

Now that they are drained and washed with RO water, we put them a small container and feed them vitamins to gut load them. I’m not sure if the eat the stuff or it just gets soaks in. Baby brine are really small, not much bigger than copepods. In addition to the baby brine, Mini also gets a mixture of frozen phytoplankton, rotifers, cyclopeezes, baby brine and vitamins. We feed her about 4 times a day.
It is also important not to make too much food at one time, this is more than enough for a few days. Also important is to make sure the water quality remains good in Mini’s tank. After each feeding the tank is cleaned up and the water is changed out with the main tank. Any remaining food goes to the clean up crew.