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It is frustratingly difficult to feed thawed fish if offered in several or many smaller pieces. The bass takes them most or half in the mouth and spits out most or half. I take them out rotten the next day. One large piece is swallowed almost always eagerly. Strange and new to me.

What do the eat Viktor?

Cheers,

Jools

When they were small at the store, they fed them frozen bloodworms. These two converted to small NLS pellets without any problem. Others did have a problem converting or some other problem. More in their dedicated thread: https://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/foru ... ry.744201/

Fish Story is open by appointment and a donation

https://youtu.be/5SpZH8o6pQc

Some ask if we are open for business.

We have been open by appointment and a donation for a while now, 7 days a week, not as we’d like with business hours and admission fee, the latter is indeterminate because the circumstances / government pretty much suffocated our efforts to open as a commercial entity (way too expensive permits, like the latest two are $200K), so we are forced to change approach and try to become a bona fide farm and then bring visitors in under agritourism.

I've no beef with the government. I must believe the laws are the same for everyone country, state, and county wise. Our Collier County is known to be on the tight, cautious, and conservative end, with the focus on preserving what the County has and a reserved, resisted development, they seem to oppose development in general and the largest portion of the County is occupied by Nature Preserves.

This is also a rich County, where the mean citizen is far richer than those of surrounding Counties and among the top in the whole of USA - #2 in Florida and #14 in all the USA: https://www.gulfshorebusiness.com/flori ... lth-index/

As any governmental, bureaucratic machine, it is inflexible, cumbersome, indifferent and usually fails to be selective, that is, to make the process easier for beneficial, interesting and unusual ventures that would benefit the County, the town, the locals. Or maybe they tried to make it easier for us and we just didn't realize and are ungrateful. IDK, who knows what occurs behind the scenes...

Our situation is unique - we built the business right where we live. Our 10-acre lot is zoned Agricultural Single Family Residential, and we obtained a Conditional Commercial Land Use permit from the County in 2012 (cost us 1.5 years and $30K), that is 10 years ago now, for a Commercial Educational Aquarium, only for 7000 sq ft (we set the square footage intentionally low to increase the chances of success in getting the permit). The County workers rarely know how to deal with our unusual situation, so the understandable lack of confidence and competency on their part doesn't help, but our hired private engineering firm tells us that if we were zoned Commercial it'd be FAR more expensive, because then all the requirements are known and clear and the book would be thrown at us. So those $200K Site Improvement Plan and Change of Use permits could have turned into half a million if we didn't live here and were zoned Commercial.

One example of two dozen: a sidewalk is required by the County for businesses. We are in the dead end of a private, single-lane 0.4-mile road with 12 households on the road before us. We all own the road. There is no sidewalk, there are ditches and woods on both sides of the road. But the County says we must have a sidewalk running the length of our property. So, the two ends of the proposed 600-ft long sidewalk we must construct would begin and end nowhere, in the neighbor's woods Okay, the County says, if this doesn't make sense, you must pay the County $35K mitigation fee, so we reserve this money to build a sidewalk somewhere else in town, where we deem needed. This seems a disguised racketeering

Another example: the County is concerned about potential danger our lakes and ponds and storm water ditches may present to our visitors, even though the visitors would have no legal excess to any of the water bodies (7000 sq ft, remember?) like falling in the water injury, alligators, etc., so they think we should fence the lakes! What!? We live here! How would you like to fence three lakes, two ponds, and two ditches on your beautiful, lusciously landscaped, nature-preserve style 10 acre property to enjoy the fence views everywhere, not to mention the $100K this would cost? We told them "Maybe let us fence the parking area then?" - the second ugliest and utterly inconvenient choice for us. They said "Maybe, we don't know yet, we need to dig deeper to see if this could be allowed". And our parking lot is beautiful and artistically, uniquely laid out for our and people's enjoyment!

In any case, the flip side of winging a DIY business on a shoestring by an amateur and non-businessman without much needed details in the Business Plan is that you risk never opening for business the way you want and for the past 12 years this has been proving true for us.

Nevertheless, glory to God for all things!

The younger leerii has been abstaining from food ~3 months. A few days ago lost control of body positioning and swimming. I presume the cause is thiaminase in frozen fish, insufficient supplementation, and the resulting B1 deficiency. I don't think this fish has eaten anything since we had discovered the B1 lack as a wide spread cause among our predators and started to supplement properly.

Feb 23 2023 was given a B1 injection per prior video on the topic. Three days later it regained the balance.

Glad to see it sitting upright Viktor. I wouldn't have guessed that B vitamins would do that.

Good luck!
Eric

Thank you Eric. Don't try at home. The key is to first cause a vitamin B1 deficiency in your fish. Then give them B1 injections and admire the progress... like in today's video below:

***

After many months of fasting and two vitamin B1 injections, the RTC started taking a few pellets 3 and 2 feedings ago, then took a large mullet piece 1 feeding ago (missed, not filmed), and now took two large pieces of mullet in this feeding:

Viktor Jarikov wrote: ↑28 Feb 2023, 03:06Thank you Eric. Don't try at home. The key is to first cause a vitamin B1 deficiency in your fish. Then give them B1 injections and admire the progress...

I'll try to avoid the deficiency.

Cheers, Eric