Jack Dempsy not eating

[billfish]

I'm hoping someone might be able to shed some light on this.

I have a Jack Dempsy that is 3 years old and for the past two months, yeah your reading that right, 2 months has refused to eat....anything! His behavior changed in that he just wanted to hang out at the bottom of the tank or hide behind the tank decorations, and could care less when I opened the lid to drop in food. His tank mates are all there, and doing fine.
Now I must add at this time he is back to his old self and greedily eating everything I drop in there for him, just as fast as I drop it in.
He started eating a couple of days ago, just as suddenly as he had quit eating 2 months ago.
Any ideas as to why this guy quit eating for such a long time?

Thanks for any input.......

 

[svetlana]

It is fortunate that he came out of his hunger strike.
I also had fish who did this.
Once I left my fish to the care of one girl who was obviously could not handle live worms very well but at the time I trained her she did not show it.
As I fugured out later she did not rinse the worms and gave rotten ones to my fish. As a result, my African bush fish lost appetite for a month (fortunately she regained her confidence and started eating when I thought that she was going to die of starvation), my big and beautiful catfish got infection because of it and after that was in and out of his appetite and eventually died inspite of all medication. My Jack Dempsy was also affected but not for long because he had option to eat other food (pellets and sticks) and did not get sick. Severum did not eat for a couple of weeks afterwards.

So, maybe your JD ate something bad and took his time to recover. Lucky him and you.

-s