alternatives for dragonettes

[loyalhero90]

Hello all,

While I don't have a mandarin I wanted to ask some questions about food other than frozen and pods. While I know they love pods I have read other places that in the wild they actively eat other things and one person even said they could suck up a snail if small enough (sorry cant find the articles) so I was just wondering:

 

1) If you had an active breeding pair of shrimp (think sexy shrimp or cleaner shrimp) would the mandarin also eat the shrimp eggs or larvae?

2) If decapped brine shrimp eggs were offered would that also be eaten?

3) Have anyone seen their dragonette eat small snail eggs or larvae?

 

Thanks!

[altolamprologus]

I have a pair of cleaner shrimp breeding in the tank with my mandarins but its not an effective food source. The eggs hatch at night when the mandarins are hiding. If you stay up late and catch the larvae, you could potentially turn all your pumps off the next day and put the larvae back in to be eaten, but your other fish would get to them much faster. Plus a thousand babies every 2 weeks sounds like a lot, but they only live a couple days so the mandarin would starve ridiculously quickly.

 

They will eat decapped brine eggs but that's not a sufficient food source and it would still need to be supplemented with frozen food and pods.

 

I have never seen my mandarins eat snail eggs, but I also have very few snails so I can't comment on that.

 

Bottoms line, training a mandarin to eat frozen and culturing you own copepods is much much easier than trying to find obscure alternatives.

[loyalhero90]

I have a pair of cleaner shrimp breeding in the tank with my mandarins but its not an effective food source. The eggs hatch at night when the mandarins are hiding. If you stay up late and catch the larvae, you could potentially turn all your pumps off the next day and put the larvae back in to be eaten, but your other fish would get to them much faster. Plus a thousand babies every 2 weeks sounds like a lot, but they only live a couple days so the mandarin would starve ridiculously quickly.

 

They will eat decapped brine eggs but that's not a sufficient food source and it would still need to be supplemented with frozen food and pods.

 

I have never seen my mandarins eat snail eggs, but I also have very few snails so I can't comment on that.

 

Bottoms line, training a mandarin to eat frozen and culturing you own copepods is much much easier than trying to find obscure alternatives.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I figured as much that they might be okay for snacks but not for dominant foods. I have one more question that is kind of tied to feeding. Why not just dedicate a tank to a mandarin? This was just in response to the comment about the other fish eating the food before the mandarin got to it; which I hear a lot.

I usually hear of people putting mandarins in with other fish like clownfish but I rarely hear of people putting them in by themselves. Wouldn't that make feeding a lot easier since they would not be harassed especially now that mandarins could successfully be raised in smaller tanks? I don't mean to sound rude or criticize people's choices but I've always wondered. If the mandarin needs such dedication, is such a docile fish that can be bullied, and is so hard to feed why not dedicate a full tank to it?

[iPhone]

i have a pair of ora mandarins that eat anything i feed my fish.

get ora,they are tank raised on prepared foods.

[loyalhero90]

i have a pair of ora mandarins that eat anything i feed my fish.

get ora,they are tank raised on prepared foods.

Do you target feed them or use a diner or are they active hunters?

[iPhone]

Do you target feed them or use a diner or are they active hunters?

they either eat the leftovers from the water column or go to a corner in the tank and i give them whatever im feeding the fish.

 

i would suggest to you nutramar ova as mandarins usually go after it quickly in the beginning,after a few days you can mix in other foods.