Hi Cynthia,

what kind of cichlids would you like to trick?

Presenting live (moving) food such as some freshly hatched artemia for smaller cichlids or bloodworms/chironomid larvae for larger cichlids in a clear tube should work.

My Lake tanganyika cichlids would often try to eat the artemia they see moving behind a clear divider.

Best wishes,

Alexander

Thanks, Alexander. I might train them to live food in the future. For now I've arrived at a protocol in which the Astatotilapia burtoni (Tanganyika) will reliably strike at dry food that they can't get to. The challenge wasn't so much getting them to try to strike past a clear barrier, but rather getting them to calm down enough to try to forage in a novel tank after substantial harassment. 

I've found that they'll try to eat almost anything that vaguely resembles their flake food when they're calm. I chopped up some red, green, and yellow plastic zip-ties, and they repeatedly took those bits up and spit them out again. They'll do the same with bits of chopped toothpick, colored or uncolored. When calm, they're super easy to trick. When stressed, not so much. 

Cichlids like angel discus this type of fishes some times stick to take flake food. This is called hunger stick. If you feed them continuously feed they become bore. It is easily can solved by release some guppy fry (5-10 nos.) per tank then they take it.

I'm agree with Samiran.