Red tailed black shark, weird behavior

[miagrewal]

I have a red tailed black shark. I have had it for about three months. I have platys, catfish minnows with it. The behaviour of the shark surprised me. It never comes to the top of the tank. I never see it eating anything. It acts like a bottom feeder, but even then it doesn't eat the fish food on the bottom. It just passes by the fodd. Initially I thought I would lose it because it will starve to death, but its still alive and healthy, but I honestly dont know what it eats to stay alive. It never bothers any other fish in the aquarium. In fact I have seen the shark suck on the glass walls of the aquarium like an algae eater, but I have bunch of algae growing, so its not that it was eating the algae, I finally got an algae eater to do the job. Since all my other fish are still alive, do you guys have any idea what its eating and what is the normal behavior of these sharks?

 

[Luvi]

Hey, I have had mine for only about 4 weeks, I have the same worry as you do - "what does it eat?" It is a bottom feeder and it hardly swim on the top part. It will search everywhere for algae to eat. I spoke to the LFS staff, he said, don't worry, if it is still alive, it is eating something.... Anyway, I found that it eats the sinking algae wafers by Hikari, but this is a very hard wafer, it may take the whole night for it to soften up, then the RTS will eat it, it won't eat it when you first drop it in becuase it is too hard. I tried the Tetra sinking tablet and the BIO tropical pallets, it didn't eat it..

I am sure some other people here has RTS, any suggestions?

 

[NoDeltaH2O]

I have 2 RTSs, one black and one albino. They are in separate tanks, and I have seen both of them forage on algae. I believe they would eat algae all day long if I had enough in there for them. Before I was injecting CO2, I had bad algae growth and the RTSs could always be seen eating algae. Now that I have less algae, they eat whatever I feed the tanks; flakes, daphnia, brine shrimp, bloodworms, tubifex worms, shrimp pellets, algae wafers, zucchini, spinach, kale, etc.

 

[bravefish90]

Rainbow and red tailed sharks eat algea, I have seen it and so has most of the staff in the shop. they seem to like the hikari algea wafers but will also munch on shrimp pellets( i feed like two in a week) they seem to only like those foods,wierd huh?
Edit: They also eat frog pellets, thje soft ones, cuz a guy came in once and said his adf's werent eating cuz his RTS was eating their food!