Mandarin info

[jamescon85]

Hi all,

 

This is by far my favourite fish, however i want to make sure my tank is ok for one as i have heard they cna be picky eaters. I have a 130 litre tank with around 10kgs of live rock. I have no other bottom dwellers as i know these eat Copepods so i wanted to make sure there would be no competition for it. Before i get one i will also ask the shop if they eat brine shrimp. So onto Copepods, i have looked on ebay and you can get 110ml for £4, i guess i would just empty the bag in the tank? and then i was thinking of doing this maybe twice a month? would that be enough/too little?

 

cheers

[tetraodon]

check out the dragonet show off thread on here, many people have kept them with great success, i had mine on frozen food and very happy till he decided he was a bird.

[CronicReefer]

You should be able to see copepods crawling around your substrate/glass/live rock in very large quantities before introducing a mandarin if you want to ensure long term survival. They eat all day long and need a readily available food source. If you can purchase one already trained on frozen it will be much easier to keep the fish alive if you do not have a sustainable population of copepods.

[jamescon85]

ok cheers, do these just form from live rock? also if i did keep buying it say monthly would it help maintain a population of them? i would rather be over cautious to ensure everything will be perfect

[CronicReefer]

 

You should see bugs like these everywhere. The larger ones are easier to see on the rocks but the smaller ones will be there as well. Buying pods can get expensive because a larger mandarin could easily eat an entire bottles worth in a day.

[Mariaface]

They come in on live rock, yes, but you'll want to wait until even the glass is littered with them. I wouldn't add a mandarin in my tank and I can't go half an inch along the glass without coming across a pod (and half of them are carrying egg sacs right now). You'll also want to feed them, so that they're more nutritionally dense for your mandarin, and that might involve purchasing phytoplankton or other small foods (µms small).

 

When you do get a mandarin, you really want one that's already eating frozen food so that you don't need to go through the trouble of training it. There should be places to get tank raised mandarins who accept mysis (don't do brine shrimp unless you're feeding <8hr old baby brine shrimp, because they're not very nutritious once the yolk from the egg is gone) or nutramar ova or other frozen foods.

 

And you may also want to get what in the freshwater world is called a 'shrimp feeding station', a shallow cylinder dish with a tall tube attached to it. You can add the mandarin's food to the tube and it'll sink down into the dish without needing to travel all around the tank's water column. With the pumps off, the food'll sit there so that the mandarin can eat until it's nice and full.

[Tamberav]

Hi all,

 

This is by far my favourite fish, however i want to make sure my tank is ok for one as i have heard they cna be picky eaters. I have a 130 litre tank with around 10kgs of live rock. I have no other bottom dwellers as i know these eat Copepods so i wanted to make sure there would be no competition for it. Before i get one i will also ask the shop if they eat brine shrimp. So onto Copepods, i have looked on ebay and you can get 110ml for £4, i guess i would just empty the bag in the tank? and then i was thinking of doing this maybe twice a month? would that be enough/too little?

 

cheers

 

Train it to frozen, feed frozen 1-2x a day. Don't rely on pods, they eat them non-stop so twice a month would never be enough in a small tank. Most any fish will eat copepods with wrasses being the biggest offenders.

 

Think of copepods as a supplement to frozen foods.

[CronicReefer]

Train it to frozen, feed frozen 1-2x a day. Don't rely on pods, they eat them non-stop so twice a month would never be enough in a small tank. Most any fish will eat copepods with wrasses being the biggest offenders.

 

Think of copepods as a supplement to frozen foods.

+1 to this. It is rare to have a sustained large enough pod population in your tank to support a mandarin. If you know you do not have this frozen trained is a must.

[jamescon85]

yep ok cheers for the help, if my local aquatics shop cant show me one eating frozen food then i wont bother with one

[jamescon85]

went into dobbies today and they had one mandarin, they said they had had him for 3 weeks, i asked if they fed it frozen food and if i could see it eating, they dropped in some brine shrimp and it went straight for it. So i got it, been in my tank a few hours and he seems to have settled himself into a cave, and he has been eating too. So hopefully he lasts

[Tamberav]

went into dobbies today and they had one mandarin, they said they had had him for 3 weeks, i asked if they fed it frozen food and if i could see it eating, they dropped in some brine shrimp and it went straight for it. So i got it, been in my tank a few hours and he seems to have settled himself into a cave, and he has been eating too. So hopefully he lasts

 

Just make sure to ween him off brine and on to mysis. Brine does not have enough nutrition.

[Alexraptor]

I maintain a stable of population of pods in a 10g with super fine sand and A LOT of macroalgae and very hollow live rock.

But even then I supplement every other day with frozen lobster eggs, just to be sure she gets the nutrition she needs.

[Liamgray90]

I put 3 bags of cope pods in a week and she eats garlic brine no problem

you can see him get eexcited when the foods in the water like a puppy

[jamescon85]

I put 3 bags of cope pods in a week and she eats garlic brine no problem

you can see him get eexcited when the foods in the water like a puppy

 

What size bag of cope pods do you use? i am going to get some but not sure what size

[CronicReefer]

The most important thing is that they are benthic(bottom dwelling) pods. Tisbe are usually the recommended type.

[Liamgray90]

There not labelled size buts its bout 1nch wide by 6 inch long