Green Mandarin Dragonet

[Bgough526]

So I bought a GMD from my lfs 2 days ago. I have a well established 15g reef tank, I’ve been doing thorough research for about 2 years on how to keep them and actually owning one is stressing me out lol. Even though I populated my tank with a bottle of tiger copepods 2 days ago, I cannot tell if my copepod population is established enough to sustain him. I turned the middle of my sump into a mini refigium today hoping that the copepods will breed successfully. And I am trying to teach him to eat frozen baby brine shrimp and fish eggs with entice and phytoplankton. Any suggestions as to how I can keep him successfully or make sure that he is doing ok?

 

[Spyndera99]

I actually have a mandarin that eats mysis in a 20g. My suggestion is just to be patient. start with copepods and then slowly start feeding other things.

 

[Bgough526]

How long have you had him? And how did you train him to eat frozen food?

 

[Spyndera99]

Slowly but surely, you can get the mandarin to eat the mysis. Just feed that to the other fish. One more thing, it works for SOME mandarins. For others, it doesn't. It all depends on the mandarin in question.

 

[ninjamyst]

Good luck. If your mandarin is not eating pellets, you gonna go broke buying pods every month for the fish. I doubt your small tank can sustain a pod population long term for it.

 

[RedSeaReefer1]

I seeded my tank with close to 100,000 copepods in my regugium. I have 3 copepod only eaters and they all do very well. I recommend you invest properly in them so your fish don’t die. You should have a bigger tank for copepod eaters….