caferacermike
Thu, 16th Aug 2007, 06:26 AM
For those of you successfully keeping blue ribbon eels alive (BTW please introduce yourself) last night was probably my biggest night ever. I had been successful at keeping my first blue ribbon eel alive for about 7 months when one evening I actually saw it eat a ghost shrimp. Until then I would just add about 70 ghost shrimp in one evening per week hoping it would eat something. For months I would leave the bag of shrimp on the counter for hours after filling it with pellet foods, planktons and Kent garlic extreme, since by themselves ghost shrimp are not very nutritional. With the capture on digital film of my eel with a nice little shrimp in it's mouth about 2 months back, I was confident it was healthy. About this time I received a notice from April that Polly's had a juvenile male blue ribbon eel (all black) and expressed a wish for me to add it to my established eel. I did just that about a month back. I had seen it sniffing at the shrimps but had not witnessed it actually eat them, that was until last night. Last night I saw it grab a shrimp and retreat into it's den. Noticing how fat my blue eel was and a lack of shrimps I headed to the freezer for some PEmysis. I added a few drops of garlic to hopefully make them smell like their food source and lowered the frozen chunk by hand to their den. To my humbled amazement a few seconds later the black eel came out and took a large pile of mysis from the ends of my fingers. When it came back out and took more I was excited. It was when my blue eel came out and got a mouthful of shrimps that I felt my work had all finally paid off. I've never heard another success story first hand from anyone. I've heard an occasional "oh some guy on reef central" and all reading sources say this is near impossible.