So one of the questions that is still up in the air is...
once you do acclimate this fish to eating a new food type will it no longer recognize its native food as food.
Back on the first page someone bounced this idea around and maybe we should try and revisit this. My feeling is a number of reefers would like to get these larval raised fish (not only for the eco-part of it) but w/ the hope that these fish WON'T eat their precious corals. My guess would be that the larval raised fish will be trained to recognize new prepared foods as food, but foods, smells, and tastes are genetic. So they most likely will go after their innate native foods w/ equal gusto as the new foods. Like Mick says unless you can prove me otherwise I'm not believin'. I'm certainly not believing the gut of these animals morphs into a dogfood digesting machine either.
"This step actually causes the gastro-intestinal tracts of these fish to develop differently from their wild cousins, allowing these now captive specimens to assimilate the artificial food. "
Most likely the fish already have the machinery(enzymes) to breakdown the prepared foods as well.
Ocean rider which raises seahorses has shown us that you can train a seahorse to eat dead foods(do they eat pelleted food yet?), but the seahorse still likes and eats all the live food you can give it as well. Another case in point, comes from the reptile world, old world chameleons eat living crawling insects, they recognize this as food,it genetic. So many breeders ofcaptive born/raised chamelons have attempted to feed these insectivores w/ dead foods in hopes of training them to recognize this as food as well. It doesn't work very well, occasionally you can get them to eat dog food, but as a whole they will only see insects as food.
So back to our larval-raised fish, while the scientist have certainly increased the surviving fraction of fry and made more larval fish available to the world (most of these fish are 0.5-1.25" long-whats the survival of these fish in the home aquarium??) they still will most likely eat whatever foods was "preprogrammed" into their genes, as well as pellets. Well -Until the scientist start doing brain transplant on these larval fish.
I'd love to read others opinions as well.
my opinion
frank
once you do acclimate this fish to eating a new food type will it no longer recognize its native food as food.
Back on the first page someone bounced this idea around and maybe we should try and revisit this. My feeling is a number of reefers would like to get these larval raised fish (not only for the eco-part of it) but w/ the hope that these fish WON'T eat their precious corals. My guess would be that the larval raised fish will be trained to recognize new prepared foods as food, but foods, smells, and tastes are genetic. So they most likely will go after their innate native foods w/ equal gusto as the new foods. Like Mick says unless you can prove me otherwise I'm not believin'. I'm certainly not believing the gut of these animals morphs into a dogfood digesting machine either.
"This step actually causes the gastro-intestinal tracts of these fish to develop differently from their wild cousins, allowing these now captive specimens to assimilate the artificial food. "
Most likely the fish already have the machinery(enzymes) to breakdown the prepared foods as well.
Ocean rider which raises seahorses has shown us that you can train a seahorse to eat dead foods(do they eat pelleted food yet?), but the seahorse still likes and eats all the live food you can give it as well. Another case in point, comes from the reptile world, old world chameleons eat living crawling insects, they recognize this as food,it genetic. So many breeders ofcaptive born/raised chamelons have attempted to feed these insectivores w/ dead foods in hopes of training them to recognize this as food as well. It doesn't work very well, occasionally you can get them to eat dog food, but as a whole they will only see insects as food.
So back to our larval-raised fish, while the scientist have certainly increased the surviving fraction of fry and made more larval fish available to the world (most of these fish are 0.5-1.25" long-whats the survival of these fish in the home aquarium??) they still will most likely eat whatever foods was "preprogrammed" into their genes, as well as pellets. Well -Until the scientist start doing brain transplant on these larval fish.
I'd love to read others opinions as well.
my opinion
frank
