Ember Tetras

Hi

I added 8 ember tetras to my fishless cycled tank yesterday and they seem to have settled down well.  They started off huddled together in a corner but soon began exploring. 

What is the best food for them?  The guy at the pet store suggested flakes ground up finely so I bought them but is there anything they specially like as a treat?  He mentioned cucumber and peas.

Also, how often must I test the water?

Thanks
PS I was singing the praises of this forum in the pet store.  The guy seemed very impressed!   

Haven't kept them myself, but I'm sure they'd enjoy some tubifex, bloodworm, daphnia or brine shrimp as a treat.

Shelled peas also go down well on the vegetable front. Haven't had much success with any other veg.

New Life Spectrum foods are great and the pellets for small fish would be small enough for embers. Flake would be a good staple as always.

Frozen live would be better than alive live food as 8 ember tetras wouldn't be able to eat a whole bag of alive food before it went off. Frozen cubes are much easier with only a few small fish. But they contain a huge amount of food so sacrifice a knife and shave the side off a cube the first time you feed it, thaw it out in a bit of water before feeding. You'll soon get to know just how much they can eat in one meal.
I would stick with brine shrimp and daphnia and maybe cyclops. Blood worms are a bit big for ember tetras. Mine swim round the tank with one end in their mouths slowly eating it.

I feed peas to my fish every so often. Cook them in water in the microwave or save a couple from your meal; squeeze the insides out of the skin and chop/mash till the pieces are small enough. For embers, I would hold the pea mash just under the surface and wriggle it into the tank so it doesn't fall to the bottom in a blob. Embers prefer to catch the pea bits in the water rather than eat it off the bottom.


But above all, remember that fish don't need as much food as most people think. Feed less than you'd think; you can always add more.

Hi,

Not sure if this will work but I'm copying and pasting a link from another posting on this forum that might help with additional suggestions for food:
http://www.thinkfish.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,1669.0.html

My x-ray tetras didn't eat much for the first few weeks - although I didn't feed them much either (only about 3 flakes morning and 3 flakes evening, crunched up) - but now they're much more avid feeders, with some having very ravenous appetites and others less so.  Different ones seem to like different foods too  eg the larger x-ray tetras eat the flakes, whereas the smaller ones seem to like the small pellets.