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Current English version of Coral Magazine, Feb-Mar 2006, Vol 3, No. 1
Article is titled: "Saltwater" Guppies as Live Food by Dr Ellen Thaler who, I believe, is a professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
She advocates the use of guppies rasied in semi-marine salinites as feeder fishes. Her recommendations are based on her own experiences with two 3-year-old Antennarius maculatus and an adult Antennarius nummifer which she also occasionally feeds frozen shrimp.
But I raised a commerson almost exclusively on defrosted frozen for over four years (ultimately killing him with a heater malfunction) and have many anglers over two years in captivity that have never been fed live foods. I also have a few fellows that will eat nothing but live foods. They will get mollies, guppies, f/w ghost shrimp, and marine shrimp.
I am still of the opinion that a varied diet is the key to successful angler husbandry. An exclusive diet of defrosted silversides is much too fatty and would probably promote liver degeneration. Pietsch and Grobecker examined (dissected) a variety of reef frogfishes and found:
"the diets of frogfishes consists of a highly varied, overlapping assortment of prey types"
I think that guppies and mollies have their use in the feeding of froggies. But I still advocate other (primarily marine) and varied feed items for frogfish health.
I think that many are discounting cryptocaryon and amyloodinium diagnosis in the deaths of thir frogfishes.
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