If they are not trained onto frozen food I would start by purchasing either live Artemia (bribe shrimp) locally or buy a little vial of brine shrimp eggs because it’s a lot cheaper and you know what food the brine shrimp has eaten. I recommend the San Francisco Bay brand because they have a pretty high hatch rate so you don’t have to go through all that decapsulating process. A small air pump and (washed) water bottle is pretty much all you need to hatch brine shrimp eggs. If you want to raise them (not required) I would recommend soy bean powder and activated yeast as food but I won’t go into raising them much further since it is a quite complex process.
During this time I would also separate the coral banded shrimp and the pipefish. If it is a blue banded coral shrimp or Zanzibar boxer shrimp it’s fine.
I would also start planning on a upgrade. A 35g is big enough.
I would feed the pipefish the newly hatched baby brine shrimp instead of adults because they have a higher nutrient value. Turn off all the pumps for about an hour so there is no water movement (makes it easier for pipefish to eat). If the pipefish doesn’t look interested don’t panic.
I had a not trained blue stripe pipefish in my old 29g along with a colony of sun coral and a trained green mandarin. They were perfectly fine without much pods. Just feed their choice of food which mine were mini mysis soaked in garlic and selcon.
My blue stripe never seemed to eat any of the live brine shrimp at first until he grew much fatter than the time of purchase. Note that my tank had extremely small population of pods due to the mandarin. After a few weeks I would mix the baby brine shrimp with frozen baby brine shrimp or cyclops and then mix the frozen cyclops to frozen adult brine then frozen adult brine to frozen mysis and so on. Good luck on your pipefish!
