How do you know when you've got enough pods for a mandarin.

[BanjoBandito]

Buy a captive bred that will eat other stuff

 

[Glenner’sreef]

So just a few days ago I posted on another thread here on reef2reef about the lives of these little creatures in question. Simply put: they live to eat and breed!!! That’s it! No social life, nada eat and reproduce. On the other thread I explained my opinion using math. In a nutshell here’s what I said. We’ve all pretty much heard of the unbelievable math equation that if you doubled a single dollar $1 from 1 to 2 then 2 to 4 to 8 - 16 - 32 - 64 - 128 etc etc. From 1 - 128 those numbers were doubled 7 times. If you continued to double the numbers for a total of 29 times I believe you’d come up with 1.6 Billion dollars!!! Just by doubling a dollar 29 times. Now pods are a little different because we’re not starting off this math experiment with 1 dollar or 1 pod, but when a single mature female produces her first batch of eggs the number is 40 eggs! And I’m just guessing but I’ll bet we all have more than one female copepod doing all of the producing. Amphipods are good size and easy to see but copepod adults are small, not to mention their edible offspring. My three year old Mandarins are fat, I don’t seed my tank. My conclusion is the above math problem. It’s true that Dragonets eat 300-800 pods a day. When there’s 50 to 100,000 pods at any one time and 50,000 of them are females (with 40 eggs each) ready to hatch 2 million baby pods, for the Mandarins, there’s just no catching up.