Susan Bates
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- Apr 17, 2016
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I have 4 dragnets,I feed them lobster eggs daily, they are as fat as mud, have you tried themSummary: Added Gillian "Orange Chicken" to the DT about a week ago and he's not looking so good. Thinner than he has been, and now he's loosing coloration around his head:
The white dots are from sediment stirred up form me trying a target-feeding; none of those are permanent. Also; the glass in that corner is a bit dirty (I've not wanted to disturb his corner), so his face came out a bit more "fuzzy" in the picture than it actually is.
Discoloration is around the "eyebrow" and left edge of the "A" orange strip (near the gills). When viewed from above (hard to picture), his head seems about twice as wide as his body.
He doesn't seem to eat a lot - if at all. In the QT, I tried a bunch of different options and it seemed that Cyclopod+ was the thing that worked best. He was putting on weight before the transfer from QT to DT (RS 525xl).
The DT is a bit more than 4 months old (so yes; still young - I didn't know until after we had him what was best for mandarins; my bad -sad face-). During this time (mostly in the last month), I've added in four batches of tiger pods and three of the 16oz tisbe pods to the refugium (which has a lot of chaeto growth). I've been target-feeding him the Cyclopod+ in between the rock and glass in the pic as it seems that's a fairly quite flow zone where the food can settle.
Water params are normal and none of the other fishes - including ones he was in QT with - appear to be having issues (all eat well and actively swim, no parasites, etc.).
I'm thinking at this point that his problem is almost certainly a lack of available food in the DT. I assume my next step is to try different foods again - eg; breed and feed (via Paul B's feeder) some brine shrimp to see if he'll take that now (he did not before).
If that makes sense; should I try to remove him from the DT in order to be able to feed him better? Or leave him in there in order to disturb him as little as possible? I've got other fish in QT right now, so don't really have a good tank for him to go into, but I can go pick one up if that will give him more of a chance...?
Is there anything else that I could do here? Short of looking to re-home him, of course (which is an option - the LFS seems able to keep mandarins in their displays, so I'm pretty sure they would take him).
