One of our prized surgeonfish seems to be getting a little skinny for our liking despite being fed like a king and showing a nice fat belly. The most likely cause of this weight loss is internal parasites, the likes of which require specific treatment.
After conferring with the Fish Wrangler, he prescribed using General Cure which contains both Metronidazole and Praziquantel in food to target feed the skinny tang. Rather than remove the Acanthurus from his nice surge-y home, we are opting to spike his food with General Cure but instead of going the frozen food route, we are trying something new.
We are big fans of cold extruded fish food by New Era Aquaculture, not only for its nutritional quality but also its physical versatility. We’ve written before about pressing cold extruded pellets into a larger one to target feed an eel in a fish display tank. In this case we are actually crumbling up the extruded pellets, adding the medicine powder and then re-forming the meal of food and medicine into the same sized pellets.
A single pouch of General Cure was mixed with approximately half an ounce of crumbled New Era Aquaculture Marine Pellets. We may have added a little much of the medicine as the surgeonfish was eating the doped pellets a little more cautiously than his usual gluttonous self, but he is eating them.
Time will tell whether this approach to enhancing cold extruded pellets will work for this particular grazing fish, but it should be even easier to follow these guidelines for medicating foods of larger fish who eat their fish whole. If anyone else has tried medicating food in a similar please do chime in with your thoughts/experiences and hopefully we’ll report back with pictures of a much fatter, healthier tang to show for our own efforts.
