Copepods

[needmorecowbell]

Oh okay so he is eating prepared, nice. I've heard that's quite hard to train them to do. You should see Carey's posts, shes trying to get hers to eat prepared.

 

[carey]

I'm still working on it. Gets better everyday. Hopefully she'll get fatter than she is and be quite happy on 100% prepared foods.

 

[MikeyD]

It was pretty easy to get my mandarins to eat prepared foods. I switched to arcti-pods. And was using a turkey baster to shoot the pods at them. Then I would mix the pods with emerald entree for a few weeks then I would give them emerald one day and then a mix the next switching every day. And then now I can just give them emerald entree and no pods but I still give them pods to keep up their color as well as shooting baby brine shrimp at them. Try that Carey. Get a small turkey baster and a Dixie cup mix in some emerald and tankwater and manually give it to him.

 

[bootz]

Should i just feed the mandarin prepared meals as opposed to attempting to grow them. I actually just picked up another 20lbs of rock and added it to the tank.( a grand total of 50lbs of lr) I was hoping more rock would yield a higher copepod growth.

 

[bootz]

p.s Mikeyd got any pictures of your mandarin im curious of how colorful it is .

 

[carey]

More live rock is a good thing. You can try different foods but you gotta make sure she is eatin them. i watch mine like a hawk when I feed just to make sure she's eating.

If you cant say for 100% certainty that you actually see her eat prepared foods you will have to get some pods for her. Or hope that you have enough in the tank to sustain her. You won't know for months though as they supposedly take a long while to starve. You will see the sunken belly and then you will know if you have enough.

Good luck, I hope you can get yours to eat prepared foods quickly. I;ve had a fair bit of success of getting mine to eat pods. I shoot the tiniest prepared foods I can buy, like cyclopeez or plantkon right at her with the flow off. That way you can see if she actually eats any.

 

[MikeyD]

Here's pics of both of my mandarins. I love mandarins they are one of my favs. I would love to get a red and a blue. But not until I get a huge 125

 

[MikeyD]

Like I have said. I feed my mandarins arcti-pods. Check them out at reefnutrition.com. As well as live baby brine to the spotted since he is only about 2" and live brine an emerald entree to the big one. I add on teaspoon of pods every other day for them. They say 1 teaspoon is good up to 100 gallons. But I only have a 40. They are very healthy and doing very well.

 

[MikeyD]

Check reefs2go.com for pods though. 2000 pods for 38 bucks. That'll start your population if u want to grow them

 

[MikeyD]

A couple more pics

 

[bootz]

the only concern i have thus far about feeding a mandarin is i have a pseudo and that guy hogs up food. i am very aware when i feed my fish and tend to keep him away with a net when i think he has ate enough. Any concerns there? if it comes down to it i just get another clown fish and start to focus on getting corals since i just invested some money in a reef led system.

 

[MikeyD]

The mandarin should be ok. What I do is when I feed the arctipods to my mandarin I turn my filter off until they settle to the bottom, usually about 5-6 minutes then turn it back on it usually takes them all day to get all the food