I purchased my first mandarin after my tank had been up and running for nearly two years. I knew I had plenty of copepods to sustain the fish for a while, but I worried that eventually the supply would run out. I knew I needed a way to provide shelter for them so they wouldn't get wiped out. So, I developed a small plan.

The first thing I did was try to establish some areas where the copepods could live and breed that the mandarin couldn't get to. My tank is a 20L, with 20 lbs live sand, and about 15 lbs of live rock arranged in one single reef that runs the length of the tank. In my other tank, I have a crushed coral substrate instead of sand. I noticed that a lot of copepods lived in the crushed coral. So I added a pile of crushed coral to the back of the tank where it wouldn't be visable. I also added a couple of piles of attractive shells near the base of the reef. I also rearranged the reef to include some areas where the goby could not enter. I can't prove that this helped sustain the population, but I believe it did.

Immediately after the fish was added to my tank, I began trying small amounts of other foods to try to find something else it would eat. I used a turkey baster and squirted the foods right towards the goby. For the first month or so, it wouldn't eat anything. I assume it was eating copepods during the night, but I never actually saw it eat. After roughly a month, I finally saw it eat a couple live brine shrimp after I squirted them to it. After another month, the goby was eating live brine shrimp and freeze dried krill.

About two years later, the goby is still alive in my tank. I belive that keeping this goby with other slow moving, peaceful fish has helped aid my success. The other occupants include 1 Threadfin goby, 1 Pajama Cardinal, and 2 ocellaris clowns. The mandarin still prefers live brine shrimp, but will take small freeze dried krill, and once in a while will eat a flake or two of flake food.

Try harder, start with live brine. Any mandarin can be trained.

How did you train the mandarins?

Can they be fed baby guppies? I'm assuming they would need to be enriched somehow first.

I doubt it. They tend to pic live food off the rocks/substrate, not swimming in the water current. When you put guppies in saltwater they tend to head straight for the surface trying to get to water w/ more oxygen in it, but eventually they just suffocate and die.

hahaha i say the comments below steve who was that du###?

apparently andy and carl think this video is gay. Maybe Jer can give a confirmation

I dont know if i just got lucky or what, but i've had my mandarin for over two years in my biocube 29. He eats brine, but i rarely feed. Mostly he just eats the pods, I have a ton of live rock though.

Hey, ive seen a few of your posts about the forums, the ones that catch my are about mandarins, because I have been studying, and researching the hobby for quite some time, and Im almost to the point of getting started, Im thinking 14g biocube, and I think the mandarin are an absolutely beautiful fish, and very intelligent, and i would LOVE to be able to house one happily in that particular aquarium. I see that most are highly against that, but you do think they would ive in a 14g biocube happily? and healthy if I am willing to put the time, effort, and dedication in for the little guy? Thank you very much for your help! And yes, id use your feeding methods, cant argue with the results you have gotten. Lol I posted this, quoting you on another thread, I would just PM but your inbox is full, its 4 am right now, so hopefully you will see this and I can check out the response tomorrow, thanks.

I have a 24G Nano Cube Deluxe. I have had a Mandarin/Dragonet for about 6 months. It eats frozen Brine shrimp. I feed it 2-3 times a day. He eats about 7-8 shrimp at each feeding. I make sure he eats.

My tank is under a year old (my husband came home with the Mandarin for me--I wouldn't have done so myself with what I have read), but has plenty of algae,etc. for him to pick at inbetween feedings.

I turn my filters OFF when I feed. He has a difficult time getting the food otherwise. Everyone knows it's food time when those filters shut off!

He is healthy, happy and well fed. His best buddy is my Clownfish. They swim all over together.

Unless you KNOW your Dragonet will eat frozen anything...I would make sure first. This is a beautiful fish and I would feel really bad if it died of starvation!

Get your mandarin off brine.

Brine is terrible for fish. It's like feeding them french fries for every meal.

Sure, he's fat now, but eventually he will die of malnutrition.

Hey, I've lived off french fries all my life and I'm ok. Kidding. Curious..what nutritional value do Copepods offer that Brine don't? No doubt live stuff has more nutritional goodies. Wouldn't live Brine be just as beneficial? What about soaking the frozen brine in vitamin supplements--I believe I read that somewhere?

You can soak the Brine with different supplements and I guess its OK. But jonrx is right Brine only is a terrible diet for any fish. Imagine sitting around all day and when you are hungry you eat potato chips. There is a ton of infomation on the web about Brine and what it lacks as far as any nutritional value. Brine in my opinion should me used once in a while as a treat for the fish to chase and catch. Also if you read about copepods on the net you will see that they pack a punch when it comes to nutrition. Good luck with your mandarin. Try finding a LFS in your area that carries live mysis, I found one in my area and my mandarin loves them. They are great in nutrition also. But then again my spotted mandarin loves just about anything that I feed it. Also try Rod's food. SteveT talked about how much his mandarin liked it. I went and got some and mine does too.


Bruce

Thanks for the advice. I was just happy he was eating. I know he is eating some of the natural goodies in the tank, but I will try some of your suggestions...and at least cut-down on the Brine.

Wow or you could just purchase enriched spirulina brine??? haha.. Read the label...

This is a great idea! I had a similar plan with my mandarin, it was eating frozen fine but I found he could never find all of it on the sand and too much was going to waste. So I gave him a feeding dish and now when he's done I just suck up the excess with a pipette! The bowl is actually a reptile feeding dish and looks quite natural in the tank.

nom nom nom!

That's awesome, hes like a little puppy lol.

I purchased some live Tigriopus Copepods and filled the tank with 'em. My Mandarin didn't look twice. One practically landed on his nose. I tried it over a period of a couple of weeks. I'd turn off the pump so they wouldn't get sucked up, etc. No go. I completely stopped the Brine while trying to get him to eat the copepods. He likes big chuncks of food apparently!

The Brine I buy is fortified with goodies--of course nothing like the live copepods! I switched to the frozen cubes "Marine Cuisine" and he appears to like it. There is Mysis in it. I will see if I can find some live. At least there is some variety with (hopefully) some better nutrition.

Thanks for the advice everyone. Can't find Rod's locally...

I am considering picking up a mandarin here in the next week or so. I am going to try PE Mysis as the training food for it since that is what I feed the rest of my tank. I just hope it goes a little better than my first mandarin since it only made it about 3 months in the tank.

Try and make sure it eats at the store before you bring it home. Have them feed it some live brine or something. If it doesnt eat it probably wont train. Try Bloodworms enriched in selcon. They instinctively go for them for some reason. I have trained 5 Mandarins onto frozen foods and failed with one. The one I did fail with didnt eat at the store but I was excited and bought her anyway. I think it was probably sick to begin with, most likely a internal parasite.

That sounds like a good idea, I know my LFS wouldn't mind throwing in a few live brine just as a test run before selling me one of them.

Is it true that scooters will take to frozen or pellets easier than mandarins?

Hi, I am a Newbie to this forum and a relative newb to the SW hobby.
I have a Fluval Osaka 155 tank(40 gallon) with 55 lbs of live rock in it. I have two false percula clowns, a yellow watchman goby and my mandarin (had him for the past 6 months) plus a bunch of softies, LPS coral banded shrip and a cleaner crew of snails and blue leg hermits. I modified an AC 110 and made it into a fuge, loaded it with live sand (about 3 inched, LR rubble and macro algae and then put a small coralife 6700k light over it, 12 hrs on, 12 hrs off. I stocked the fuge with a bottle of copepods (i have the pump choked back to about 25 gph) about a month ago to replenish the tank, and now at lights out the tank and the fuge are bug city! My mandarin is getting nice and fat and i have not tried to feed him anything (although he may go for some of the mysis once in while). My rock had been established for about 2 yrs when i added it to the tank and i have about 3 different piles of LR rubble in the tank that the mandarin can't get into. In addition, i swap out the LR rubble from the aquaclear twice a month with rubble from the tank. Every time i change the carbon pad in my bubble trap, its crawling with pods. I give the pad a little shake under the macro to dislodge as many as possible without squeezing the pad, then chuck it out and replace with another. I will post some pics as soon as i figure out how to take a good tank pic with my new camera..

i just bought a mandarin the other day..the moring after i acclimated him he had these white strings hanging out his mouth and gills...i paniced and threw some garlic in there and he recovered...now i must train him to eat the cyclopeze...i might hatch some brine shrimp in there too and i have abunch of little rock pieces im gona put together and make a copepod nursery..there just laying in the front of the tank and making the sand turn different colors..its ugly..i might aswell make use of them and make a copepod nursery...yay!!!

why go through all that trouble and just train it to eat frozen food

For those who've trained theirs, I'm curious; do you feed piece by piece directly to it with tweezer or syringe? How do you keep all the other fish from devouring mysis in the tank before it can get to the dragonet? And I only feed my tank once every three days (mysis)... is that frequency sufficient for the dragonet's health?


Tried to PM you about methods on training onto frozen, but your mailbox is full. Mind sending me a msg when you've got a moment, SDT?

The best way is to ask the person working to feed the animal and if it eats your good

This is great info. Thanks alot for the post. I look forward to reading the finished package.

I'm hoping to get a dragonet sometime soon.....if my LFS says that they feed their dragonet frozen mysis should i be okay with that?

I have no copepods in my tank currently (and people would probably say to get some and culture them) but i've read of people weaning their dragonets into frozen food and being successful.

Another thing is that they say that most of their livestock is wild-caught...Should I be worried when buying my dragonet? The usually come in looking very plump.

Thanks

What kind of tank do you plan to keep the mandarin in? What will be the other tankmates (fish)?

Almost all mandarins are wild-caught (captive breeding has only recently progressed to more than a few people).

11 months after purchase

I plan to keep the mandarin in a 20 gallon tank with lots of LR which would be housing for pods and tankmates will be a mated pair of ocellaris clown fish.

gday guys.
just joined this forum and loving the idea....

i have just set up a 10g nano reef and have just...like last week added a spotted mandarin fish
the tank has been cycling for around a month btw.

hes picking around on my 3 or 4 kilos of live rock but is looking very skinny and need to get some pods for him id say...any advice would be apprieciated

im unsure if he is eating my frozen bloodworms and mysis also.

thanks
nic

Have you read this thread? It should be clear that mandarins should be eating introduced foods before you keep one, unless you have the time and money to buy pods until you can wean it. 4 kg (8 lb) is actually lower than the recommended 1-1.5 lb/gallon suggestion when you're using live rock as the basis for filtration. Also, the very small amount of live rock will mean the mandarin can decimate the "wild" pod population in a short time.

well my live rock isnt the only filtration mate, i have 2 filters going in there too
turns out hes now weening onto the mysis shrimp and bloodworms so problem solved itself anyway

So if anybody cares...

I got a mandarin

I made sure he ate live brine, and stuffed him with it the first 2 days. The first day I just gently blew them at him from a turkey baster. The next day I did the same, but with a feeding tube. The next day, I switched the live brine for some frozen brine, and just dangled it at the end of the tube. If I take it slow, he will eat almost a whole cube of brine in about 20 minutes.

is a 3 gallon jbj pico large enough to comfortably hold a mandarin if it eats frozen food or is that just a bad idea? they dont seem like the move around all that much. but feeding with frozen looks messy and i could see that being a problem

i wouldn't recommend it.

do the red scooter dragonetts train easier than the mandarins do? my lfs has a beautiful red scooter but he isn't eating frozen at the moment. i'd get him if he was easy to train onto mysis and cyclopleeze.

Make them show you-
They're probably just feeding frozen mysis to the tank, who knows if the mandarin is eating it...

+1

And Mandarins eat constantly. Don't let them tell you that "he's not eating because he already ate". They are very active and always looking for food.

I couldn't get mine to eat Mysis for a few months, but he ate Brine since the day I got him.

Also, feed frequently and in small amounts if you don't have the pod population to supplement once-a-day feeding.

I just wanted to share my experience with keeping a Mandarin. I was able to get mine to eat Prawn roe and by doing that my pod population was maintained with the supplementation in a 14g. The only problem was that my water quality suffered and I had to perform a lot more WCs. I tried a lot of different techniques to feed him as suggested on this website, but he would only eat Prawn roe suspended in the water. So just keep that in mind that you may not be able to get yours to eat certain foods or with certain techniques, but to keep trying new ways. Anyways, good luck to you.

For a while I had an in-line pod factory. Originally it was set up to hold my LR that I accumulated in anticipation for a larger tank. Full (to the brim) 10g tank of LR with about 25L/hr tank water cycle through. I let the detritus just accumulate in that tank. The water inlet and exit were on the opposite sides of the tank, so not a whole lot of fast moving water... at all.

Let me tell you, that was pod heaven. Packed full of pods. It started to fill with sponges and breeding all different types of snails. The way I had it set up it would pull some water directly from the LR/pod tank into the main. I would watch the pods get pumped into my tank; prob about 1-2 pods every couple seconds. Had I thought about it at the time, this would have been perfect for a Mandarin.

No kidding! If I were to have a mandarin again, I would do exactly what you did and add a sump with a refuge for pods to go forth and multiply.

Hey I was thinking about getting a mandarin and have a few ?'s about 'pods and stuff.
1. Would I mandarin be happy in a 10g? (most impotant!)
2.If I were to get a cheapo 1.5g tank and put pods in there to multiply, would I be able to scoop them out and give them to the fishy?

Picked up a healthy looking Mandarin last night. This morning, excess mucus on him

We'll see how it goes, he's alone in the tank so I hope training will go a bit easier, though it looks like I bought a diseased fish.

You can't copper treat Mandarins, right?

1. no
2. no

I bought my first mandarin last Sunday. He's quite fat and sassy, and they showed me he did eat brine before I bought him. The LFS I bought him from is pretty run-down, so I figured he stood a better chance with me than with them.

I have a 30 long with 60+ lbs of LR. I don't know how anyone could keep one in a smaller tank, I feel guilty enough trying to keep one in a 30. He is constantly eating. As someone stated, they eat prawn roe. Apparently they will eat that orange sushi roe as well. I might try to pick some up. Does anyone know where you buy this?

I read that pods on the glass will congregate under those mag-floats, so I have a big mag float sitting in one spot for a few days, then I move it to release the pods. I wait for the mandarin to bop around nearby, then I slide it over to expose the pods, and he consumes them. I don't know if this helps increase the pod population or not.

Thank you!