Feeding Green Manderin

[Gellisjr1]

I currently have a Green Mandarin. I had it for a couple months now. I've been feeding Reef Nutrishion Arcti Pods & Trigger Feast. I just recently added live Copepods to the tank. My question is. How often do I need to restock the Copepods? The Copepods are so small it's impossible for me to see a decline in population.

 

[Mike.]

I seed the tank every month

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

If there is no other food source in your tank, they could go through a bottle of pods in a weekend. They eat a pod every 3-4 seconds of their waking time, and they are awake about 18 hours a day.

Ideally you would buy pods one time and use it to start a copepod culture, instead of buying it repeatedly.

 

[W31Olds]

I would try feeding him pellets or frozen foods to supplement your Pods. Once they settle in, I don't think there as picky as people think. Mine eats TDO Chomaboost , small slightly crushed, and frozen brine but likes the pellets the best. My Pod population has fallen quite a bit lately and you can tell because my Mandarin eats pellets 3 times a day now.

 

[afboundguy]

I currently have a Green Mandarin. I had it for a couple months now. I've been feeding Reef Nutrishion Arcti Pods & Trigger Feast. I just recently added live Copepods to the tank. My question is. How often do I need to restock the Copepods? The Copepods are so small it's impossible for me to see a decline in population.

How big is your system and do you have a sump and refugium in it? Depending on size you might be able to dose a few times and then have a self sustaining population that breeds in the sump that will supply the display tank constantly.

You can also dose phytoplankton to help the pod population explode as well. I dose about 250-300 ml of phyto for my system that has about 60-65 gallons that is mixed reef with NPS and clams and I have a pair of mandarins in my 35 gallon DT and I have pods all over my glass and the pair breeds.

I also culture a ton of phyto and culture 5 different pods species to help the tanks pods population. The crawling species like tisbe are probably self sustaining at this point but I do several free swimming pods that more than likely won't get to a self sustaining level in my tank which is why I do the cultures and typically I dose the tank every 2-3 days when I add phyto to the cultures.

I would also try TDO pellets. My captive bred male mows them down and the wild caught female now does as well probably after watching the male eat them. They also eat other pellet food and eat frozen mysis and brine shrimp.

White worms are also great for mandarins as they're super nutritional and I use to have a mandarin that would eat so many of them it would sometimes have worms sticking out of the gills!!!

 

[slingfox]

Depends on age and maturity of your system. I have two Mandarin Dragonets in a 110g display + 30g sump. I don’t feed the Dragonets anything directly and don’t add periodic copepods or phyto. The dragonets do just fine picking off the rocks. I the 3 months I have had the dragonets they have 3x to 4x in size. There are also two wrasse which also hunt around for critters in the rockwork all day. My system is relatively mature since it has been running for 28 months. I swapped out all the rock in the display at month 24.

 

[dedragon]

I swapped out all the rock in the display at month 24.

just curious why? dont see many people doing this

 

[slingfox]

just curious why? dont see many people doing this

You can take a look at My Tank Thread. It shows pictures of the before and after. I switched to all ocean live rock. Was expensive but one of best things I have done in terms of aesthetics and stability.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/somewhat-unique-redsea-reefer-525-g2-build.989303/

 

[dedragon]

Was expensive but one of best things I have done in terms of aesthetics and stability.

i still use and buy any pukani rock i find. just looks so much better but nowadays you cant even get dry rock from there. i always recommend people to reach out to multiple trusted reefers to get biomedia and make it as diverse as possible due to the expense and pests associated with shipping in live rock (esp australian live rock that must cost a fortune to get shipped over)
tank is looking great as well.