Green Mandarin feeding question.

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

mansiz

Aquarium Advice Freak
Joined
Apr 25, 2003
Messages
344
Location
Singapore
What should I feed my green mandarin? When i feed flakes food and freeze dried blood worms, other fishes ( clown, damsel ) eat vigorously, but the green mandarin seems to stay at the sand bed. I ask the LFS owner and they said I don't have to feed them, they would look for food on the LS and LR, is that true?
 
Mandarins rarely take to prepared foods, they eat fauna from the LR and Sand bed, in the form of pods. It is recommended you have at least 75-100 lbs of well established LR (that has had not miro predators in with it) for a single mandarin.
 
Are those copepods and amphipods visible? Do all LR contain these kind of fauna that you mention? Because i'm very afraid that the mandarin will starve.
 
the pods should be visable. You can usually see them more at night as they dont often come out in the day because everytihing in the tank eats them.

Live rock should contain these but unless you have a large amount of mature live rock its questionable if you have the proper populations to support this fish. Its very possible to have a decent stock of these pods before you get this fish and have the fish live for a few months as it slowly erradicates the population of pods till non more exist.

Your best bet is to have alot of live rock in a large tank and have a refugium dedicated to pod production.
 
Back
Top Bottom