Captive bred mandarin
- Thread starter Venzzla
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Bob Loblaw
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I have been wondering this too. My LFS always has a ton of captive mandarins and they eat almost exclusively pellets. They are in tanks with little to no sand and very little if any rock. All of them are fat and look extremely happy. I do know that these are from BIOTA. I'm more concerned about my Molly Miller Blenny even though it is also extremely small and doesn't bother anyone.
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You're asking for trouble, not from the goby, but from the amount of feeding that mandarin will require to be kept alive. There are several factors with the Mandarin beyond simply getting it to eat other foods:
1) A Mandarinfish is esentially an underwater hummingbird trapped in slow motion. It takes multiple steps to lock onto and target a given single morsel of food and as such even with turning off the powerheads. pumps, etc. you can target feed it with food dropped a few inches from it's mouth and other fish will run in and gobble up the food before it ever has a chance.
2) Mandarins that do adapt to other foods need multiple feedings per day as they have very short digestive tracts and need to feed almost constantly during the waking hours. This means a minimum of 3-4 times a day if you want it to have any real shot of long term survival. Very difficult to do this if you have a traditional full time job or school.
3) As mentioned above you will need to follow a guide to create a "Mandarin Feeding Station" in order to ensure the food gets to the Mandarin and not simply gobbled up by other fish
4) Unfortunately with a 40 gallon tank it is unlikely that it will have the amount of pods to sustain even a single mandarin in and of itself. So this makes it very dependent on it's ability to be fed.
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