Synodontis Diet Vegetable vs. Meaty

[CEfire]

Recently, my S. Eupterus has become very interested in eating the vegetable flakes that I occasionaly put in my tank. My question is: have I been incorrectly basing his diet around insect larvae? Should I feed him what he is most interested in eating or should I stick to feeding mostly meaty foods?

He used to go crazy over frozen bloodworm and brine shrimp but now he only seems to give them a taste and move on, whereas when I give him Tetra Spirunilla flakes he goes crazy and bosses around everything in the tank to ensure he gets as much as possible.

The other inhabitants in the tank seem to prefer the vegetable based foods as well (S. Robbianus and S. Velifer hybrid)

[Birger]

Recently, my S. Eupterus has become very interested in eating the vegetable flakes

It is not uncommon for preferences to change as fish get older and or bigger,the available food source or habitat may change in the wild.
Some of these syno's seem like opportunistic feeders to start with.

I myself ended up putting some young S.angelicus(2inch) with some bristlenose fry for a while due to space considerations at the time.What surprised me was while I was still supplying bloodworms etc. for them, they would join in and munch away on the green beans supplied for the ancistrus fry. Seemed like they would swim around taking bites from the beans until they found a seed from the inside of the bean, then would grab it and take off and happily chew away on it like they were just waiting for it to appear.

I will be interested to see what others have to say.

Birger

[Silurus]

Studies on the feeding ecology of Synodontis have shown that they are omnivorous and will eat plant matter also.

[sidguppy]

I have similar experiences with several Syno-species and found out by accident that it's for example Synodontis petricola (and allies) wich is most suitable for the Tropheus-community.

this because this species obviously likes lots and lots of algae....they truly graze the rocks! Once I found (before I had aufwuchseaters in there) typical scrape-markings on al my rocks. it took some serious observing before I found out who was the culprit. turned out it was my very first -and single at that time- 1" petricola-baby (they only had 1 and I HAD to buy it). I gave him some mates later on, of course.

I never saw any Riftlake-Syno graze before I kept petricola.
I knew about the algae-scraping habits of pleurops and contractus (that last one gives any Ancistrus a run for the money! ), but didn't expect petricola's to do the same.

according to literature, this should be a snaileater; wich I found that the true polli does very well indeed.

multipunctatus seems less inclined to graze, but these too like a pea or cucumberslice.

Another strange observation is that the still undescribed Synodontis "polli White" from Zambia is a true cleaning fish, wich picks parasites from other fish (medium sized cichlids), exactly the same way Reefcleaners do.
the cichlids behave exactly like the hosts on the reef; they stop moving, and slow down to a torpid state, only moving once they had enough.....

[Chrysichthys]

S. eupterus will eat cucumber if you slice it so they can get at the interior; so will Synodontis notatus.

[worton[pl]]

Mine nigritas when reched about 12cm refused to eat anything else than spirulina pellets (they were raised on bloodworms and whiteworms). However these pellets aren't pure plant matter. Now I feed them with variety of vegetables including carrot, cucumber, bean and peas and sometimes apple which my uaru love also :). They eat bloodworms now - they take them, chew them and sometimes spit it out but sometimes swallow. I think that this species also should be feed with vegetables. I just wonder if I haven't introduced pellets to my fish they would continue eating just worms?