@Gale: Thanks. Yeah, they are fatties. I've been feeding them a little more and a little fattier diet because I want to try some runs with them in the next few months.
@Pro: Sorry. I didn't notice your thread before, but now I have. They are not inexpensive fish. I mean, sure, they are pretty cheap to buy, but the upkeep is a killer. I'm lucky to have a large volume of water to back these guys up. When I was training them, they were in about 125 gals. of water and really could've used a water change every single day for the first couple of months.
If you really want to try them, try to track down the March/April issue of Coral magazine. Matt Pedersen has an article in there all about how he weaned his fish that's very, very good. I know Coral sells back issues, but if you can't track it down let me know. I'll find my copy and photocopy it for you. In the meantime here's his thread, which is what inspired me to try them in the first place:
http://www.marinebreeder.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=191&t=1922&start=0
That said, Matt's techniques (smearing food on acro skeletons) didn't work for me at all. I go through all that in the article on my website that I linked below the photo. One thing to remember as far as food goes: Eggs are your friends. I used Nutramar Ova (prawn eggs) as the food that they couldn't resist eating. Other people have had success with other types of small fish roe. But if you are going to get finicky eaters to eat, it most often seems to start with eggs of some sort. It makes sense. Eggs are very fatty and packed with calories and most fish seem to not be able to resist eating them whenever they can.
Once they are eating one food (whatever it is), then you start slowly introducing new foods while continuing with whatever it is they are eating. Then you are golden.
But these fish do need to eat often through the day. Especially at first when you get them because they'll be mostly starved when you get them. There's not a lot of time to get them onto substitute foods before they will die. But I still feed them 3-5 times per day.
Lots of water changes. I would take the time to get their tank used to processing a lot of foods, even before you get the fish. Ammonia spikes seem to put them off eating, so you want to have your tank bacteria used to a lot of foods up-front.
They are hard fish to get onto substitute foods. Really hard. I've trained cleaner wrasses and obligate corallivore butterflyfish to substitute foods. These were far more difficult.
BTW, I'm trying to scare you here. It's a lot of responsibility and a lot of expense and a lot of work to get these onto substitute foods. Go into it with your eyes open so you take your responsibility to the fish seriously. If they never take substitute foods, then it's up to you to make sure they have a steady supply of coral to eat for the rest of their lives.
Edit******
Also BTW, these have been captive-bred now and some have been raised. I'll be trying that soon as well. Captive-bred versions should be much better for captive life. If I manage to have success with them (and that's a big if, though Matt got 'em through mostly on rots), buying captive-bred would be the way to go. Not that I'm trying to push you to buy my fish, but I don't know of anyone else who's as far along with them as I am and Matt's taken some time off of breeding. But switching the food seems to be the hard part with these and captive-bred specimens should be much hardier.
