Advice for keeping a Mandarin Dragonet

[Clownfish_Boy]

When I began the thread, my initial plan was to buy some copepods now and wait until my tank was 6 months old to buy a Mandarin. After seeing some of the responses, I'm going to wait at least a year. I would honestly prefer to NOT feed prepared food. My preferred situation would be for my Mandarin to singularly eat copepods.

What do you think is my best path to success? I recognize they're a difficult fish to keep. I don't want to be "that guy" who posts a picture of his starving Mandarin and asks whats going on.

I am of the same paradigm regarding Mandarins; I would rather establish a pod or detritus worm population and let the Mandarin feed itself than try to get it to eat frozen food. I once had a 45 gallon FOWLR which had a healthy Annelid detritus worm population, in which a Mandarin thrived. Even if the fish is conditioned by ORA or Biota to eat frozen food, it is still a very slow-moving fish and you have to pipette it in front of them. And you have to take out a mortgage to buy an ORA or Biota Mandarin, too - $40 is enough to pay for one. But it is much easier to keep a Mandarin on pods or worms.

 

[Crustaceon]

Then I am wrong for 8 years ;)
But I still feel that fish was getting much food from the tank itself.

When I first started training these little guys, I tried to gauge how much feeding they actually needed. Keep in mind this was in a very established and very large tank full of live rock. Every filter sock change netted a few hundred amphipods so it had snackable critters in the tank. If the dragonet managed to snag 2-3 frozen mysis, it started visibly losing mass. My assumption here is the natural pod/amphipod population wasn’t sustaining it. If the mandarin grabbed more than ten mysis each feeding, it would maintain or even plump up a bit. IMO, unless a mandarin is pecking at a copepod every ten seconds or less, it’s probably not getting enough food. I see each mysis as the equivalent of at least fifty pods. Again, I had a stable amphipod/copepod population and even then, it wasn’t enough. They really need pods-on-glass populations to work with and unfortunately, they’re really efficient and eradicating that population.

 

[Crustaceon]

I am of the same paradigm regarding Mandarins; I would rather establish a pod or detritus worm population and let the Mandarin feed itself than try to get it to eat frozen food. I once had a 45 gallon FOWLR which had a healthy Annelid detritus worm population, in which a Mandarin thrived. Even if the fish is conditioned by ORA or Biota to eat frozen food, it is still a very slow-moving fish and you have to pipette it in front of them. And you have to take out a mortgage to buy an ORA or Biota Mandarin, too - $40 is enough to pay for one. But it is much easier to keep a Mandarin on pods or worms.

I agree the inital training process is tedious. That being said, all I do for feeding now is throw a food cube into one of my powerheads, let it blow mysis everywhere and then shut all of the pumps off. My mandarin goes nuts and picks off mysis as they’re falling out of the water column. Now I only keep my pumps off for ten minutes. That’s enough time for my mandarin to actively hunt and consume maybe up to twenty shrimpies. The rest of the day, he’s actively patrolling the tank for pods. The search never ends with them.

 

[Crustaceon]

Thank you for the insight. Great looking Mandarins by the way.

When I began the thread, my initial plan was to buy some copepods now and wait until my tank was 6 months old to buy a Mandarin. After seeing some of the responses, I'm going to wait at least a year. I would honestly prefer to NOT feed prepared food. My preferred situation would be for my Mandarin to singularly eat copepods.

What do you think is my best path to success? I recognize they're a difficult fish to keep. I don't want to be "that guy" who posts a picture of his starving Mandarin and asks whats going on.

You’re going to have to play it by ear. Either your tank can sustain the proper pod population or it won’t and you’ll have to periodically seed it with more pods. If your mandarin is happy and growing, that’s a good sign. If it’s losing mass and lethargic, it needs more food. In my situation, I could cultivate pods to sustain my mandarin, but that would impart instability in my sps dominant system by either feeding too much and having excessive nutrient issues or running a sufficiently sized refugium and having issues with it stripping out all nitrates and phosphates from the tank, which would force me to run it like a zeovit system....

 

[Cbones1979]

I would advise against not using copper. I've used Metronidazole and formalin safely.





I disagree. I can tell you from experience, most wild mandarins will not take to frozen food, as evidenced by the countless hobbyists who've starved them even when using methods similar to what you've described. They have their reputation for a reason. I've partly transitioned a couple but they still relied heavily on live foods to stay healthy. Yours likely still feeds on microfauna in your system all day.

So safety stop would be safe for mandarins?

 

[soeminpaing]

I want to share my experience with mandarin fish. I put them into small breeder box to train them into eating pellet food. The container is small around 8" x6" so the mandarin will see the food easily. They will not eat the pellets for a few weeks. But you have to add them daily and suck out the uneaten pellets. Before eating the pellets the mandarins need to be fed to prevent starving. I use mosquito larvae for that. They will easily accept mosquito larvae as food and immediately hunt these. This will be their main dish before they started eating pellets. I also have red flatworms in my tank. So my mandarin eat pellets, copepods and flatworms. I have train a few like this and always successful. I only kept one and give the others back to my friends. Mine live for 4 years until it went carpet surfing. So a lid is necessary if you want to keep it long time. They jump a lot and I underestimate their ability.