Food for life, food for Arowana!

I think it's best to share how i kept the live food for my Aro. Perhaps it gives the idea to those who wanna kept an arowana at home, that keeping arowana is not just keeping a fish, you'll have to deal with the live foods for it as well, if you wanna have a happy fish of course. Some arowanas might have been trained to eat pellets, and taking care of such aro would be a breeze. All the necessary vitamins are ready in those pellets, such as Hikari sticks and so on.

But my aro is a different story. I tried to starved it for more than 2 weeks, still not eating up pellets, and even went for a hunger strike after that! tried it a couple of time, with no luck, so i give up. My aro seems to be very picky about food, which resulting me to have some variety of foods for it.

So after the jump, are the live foods that i bought, and kept for my aro:-

These are my so called cricket's lair. The small place which i kept my crickets alive. It's a DIY box, which is a small plastic enclosure which i cut the top lid, and put some nets on top. It's a small box, only capable to keep around 60 crickets at most at a time. 60 crickets at my local LFS sells for around RM2. (RM1 for 30 crix). More than 60, then i get more dead crickets on the box.

I've put in some banana leaves, and also pandan leaves inside the box, apart from the egg crates cardbox as well. The main purpose for the leaves is to provide some natural food, and moist for the crickets to survive, and the pandan leaves is to get rid of the foul smell inside the box. Some hobbyist probably gutload their crix with a better kind of food, but for me, i just don't have enough time.

Other than crickets, in order to give my arowana a variety of diets, i also kept small amount of superworms.

Notice the double plastic tupperware for the worms? Well, it was there for some good reasons. The outer yellow plastic is actually being sprayed with some insecticide aerosol on the outer side, which is to prevent those nasty ants from attacking my superworms. At first i just put the worms inside the yellow plastic, just to allow the worms to get some free flowing air, but once i noticed that the number of worms has been decreasing. It kept me puzzled as there were no way the worms can climb out the plastic wall, and nobody has been feeding the aro except me. One day, i saw some house lizards munching the superworms, and now i know who is the culprit. No wonder my house lizards are so freaking fat nowadays! Lol. So that's the reason on the second covered plastic inside the outer plastic ware.

And also, aquarium shops normally would sell superworms inside those covered clear plastic containers at about RM10, which normally would contains around 150 superworms. (They said it's 150, i never count). lol

Sometimes, i gave my aro a special treat. :-

Juvenile bullfrogs!. These are the most expensive among all the food, costs around 50 cents per frog. Haha. However, the size of these sometimes too big, and my aro refuses to eat it. There were just times when i set these frogs free, because my aro won't eat it. Perhaps i should get myself a snake, so that i don't waste these anymore?

The frog enclosure, from a modified oat container (i think). Drilled some holes on top, and it's perfect as a temporary home for the frogs. Maximum of 4 small frogs can be kept inside.

And so, i feed my aro in rotation. Twice per day. Planning to do this until the aro is about 1 year old, then going for once per day.  Mostly on superworms and crickets. At times i also bought baby carps, just to allow the fish to fullfill it's hunting nature. 

The cost of these foods? Well, let's see, for my juvenile aro (7 mnths old, 9inches in size):

Crickets - RM2 per week. (10 crix per feeding, twice daily)

Superworms - RM10/mnth (7 SW per feeding, twice daily)

Frogs - RM2/month (1 BF per feeding, weekly)

I can say that the cost of living (LOL) for my arowana is currently about RM20 per month.