[John Hamilton]

What is the best diet for a Garden Eel?

[Ninong]

I can tell you what their natural diet is and then you can take it from there.

There are two genera and 26 species of garden eels. Twenty-one of those species are from the Indo-Pacific. The dietary habits of only a few species have been reported on but you can assume that this applies to all of them.

When feeding, they extend about two-thirds of their bodies above the sandbed to catch zooplankton as it drifts by. In general, they feed more in the early morning and in the late afternoon because that's when the zooplankton are most numerous. They feed mainly on various copepods, as much as 80% by volume. They also ingest solitary eggs, egg masses, pelagic tunicates, pteropods, ostracods, shrimp larvae, amphipods, tanaids, euphausids, mysid shrimp, radiolarians, and gastropod larvae. The stomach of an adult garden eel may contain as many as 600 copepods at one time. In general, the size of their prey ranges from 100 microns to 3 mm in length.

Hopefully that will give you some ideas on what to feed them in captivity.