Hey all,

Anyone know any online vendors that sell Mandarins already eating Frozen? Or local stores that ship?

Thanks!

Perhaps you should consider this as a potential revenue stream...?

Not economically feasible ;p

Neptune Aquatics in Milpitas, Ca is very good at getting mandarins to eat. i worked there over the summer and we weaned about 4 of them onto pellets (that is, the ones that werent already dying from shipping...stupid wholesalers. ) anyways i get see what i can do for you on that
oh yeah and they do ship, just not so much SW fish as much as their Cichlids.

The thing with getting mandarins to eat prepared foods is that they lack the vitamins and nutrients that they need from the live pods that they naturally forage on. They'll survive on prepared foods, kind of like you could survive on only bananas all day every day. If you don't have the microfauna to keep a mandarin please consider keeping something else out of respect for the fish.

Good point! What about things like pellets or flake where there are vitamins et al? This ties back to the revenue stream statement. They come in all the time and I would think that you could quadruple the price of them if they were eating pellets instead of live. Even assuming a 50% loss rate and a month of work it would still put a bit of extra $ in your pocket...

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that 99.99% of people want mandarins that eat prepared foods because they don't have the conditions to keep one properly. My guess is that along with pods mandarins like roaming space and a more natural environment in order to be more content, and in my opinion, and this is just me, if someone can't provide an optimum environment for a fish or coral then they should leave it at the fish store, or to me it defeats the purpose of why we're in this hobby in the first place.

Just my 2 cents

Actually very good point. I was approaching it more from the standpoint of seeing far too many of these guys go into tanks only to die because people can't support them and trying to come up with a way to both feed my habit and keep them alive.