What are the benefits and disadvantages of feeding live food?

I have a bumblebee goby and mono fish tank.
The bumblebees as your probably know only eat live or frozen foods, but my mono doesn’t seem to like either frozen beef heart, bloodworms, or tropical pellets.

Try some mysis shrimp and Brine Shrimp for the Mono. You can also hatch your own brine shrimp and see if the moving food might gain his attention. Garlic additives have also been proved to stimulate a fish to eat.

To answer your main questions, the benefits to live food is that many fish are very picky and refuse to eat frozen or prepared foods at first. Live food can be used as a bridge to keep them healthy while still trying to get them to eat the other foods. The downfall is their lack of nutrition. There is also a potential for introducing fungus, bacteria or a parasite into the tank (more often seen in feeder fish, but can also come in live brine shrimp or other shrimps bought from elsewhere – hatching or raising your own reduces this risk). Feeding life foods can also increase the aggressive behavior in a fish. A fish that eats live goldfish all he time has a keen hunting instinct and might eat other fish whereas one that has never eaten live fish might never think to gulp down a tankmate.

As far as the rest of the question, I assume this is a brackish tank based on the livestock. If not, you will want to add some salt (premixed and introduced via small water changes that slowly raising the salinity over several days). If this tank is freshwater only, that would be the problem. These fish do fine in fully freshwater systems when very young, but need progressively more salty environments as they age. The goby is a brackish fish as well.

What are your water parameters? His hiding could indicate a raised level of ammonia or nitrate, a wrong temperature, or something else amiss with the water quality, like insufficient filtration. The water quality should be the first thing to check when a fish stops eating. If the levels are elevated, water changes should be done to fix that issue.

Tropical fish tank

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Hikari Tropical Food Sticks 57g $5.27 Food Sticks™ are a complete, nutritionally balanced formulation, developed for carnivorous fish whose main diet of live food tends to cause nutritional deficiencies. Using Food Sticks™ instead of live foods reduces the chance of infection from parasites or bacteria found in most live foods.

Hikari Tropical Food Sticks 250g $19.67 Food Sticks™ are a complete, nutritionally balanced formulation, developed for carnivorous fish whose main diet of live food tends to cause nutritional deficiencies. Using Food Sticks™ instead of live foods reduces the chance of infection from parasites or bacteria found in most live foods.

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Hikari USA Inc. Tropical Carnivore Sticks 2.2lb $51.67 Food Sticks™ are a complete, nutritionally balanced formulation, developed for carnivorous fish whose main diet of live food tends to cause nutritional deficiencies. Using Food Sticks™ instead of live foods reduces the chance of infection from parasites or bacteria found in most live foods.

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