Dwarf Lionfish with damsels

[tayhonglee]

mine is a 3 feet tank with a radiata and a volitan. right now i have a blue devil, a 3 stripe and a 3 spot. the lions love to hunt the damsels, so they are very well behaved.

they have eaten about 10+ damsels, a small algae blenny and 2 shrimps so far. still not successful in weaning them off live feed. its kinda expensive since the volitan can eat around 3 smallish damsels at one go.

for what its worth, it might be a good idea to get volitans. mine loves to swim out in the open. the radiata is definitely likes to hide in the rocks.

[Bali Brain]

Weaning a Lionfish would take some time and requires patience. In my case, I used freshwater prawns. In the beginning the lionfish will ignore anything that doesn't move. Therefore you would have to offer something in front of him that moves. Using a pincer or clamp or whatever you need to clamp the live prawn and offer to him. It shouldn't take long for him to whack the prawn as soon as he sees that it is alive. After that, I'll offer the prawns in progressively less lively stages, i.e. wounded and dying prawns, with very little movements and barely alive. This it will still take as it can still detect movements. The difficult part is when you are offering dead prawns still using the clamp. If it doesn't work you have to go back to the dying prawns again, and then after some time, it should respond to the dead prawn. The next stage would be to offer fishmeat using the same clamps. If you can get the Lionfish to associate the clamp with food, then it will eventually respond to the fishmeat. After that, while holding the meat on the clamp, I will drop the fishmeat right in front of his mouth. It should after a while also respond to this. The final stage is when you can just drop the meat anywhere without using the clamp and the Lionfish will go for the food.

Hope this helps.