Are pods eating my zoas?

Why? I have a healthy pod population.. also ill train it for mysis

 

Its healthy now but a mandarin will diminish a pod population in no time. I have tried twice in my 220 thinking it is large enough to sufficiency sustain a mandarin and have lost both of them.

They are better off left in the ocean IMO.

 

What if i buy only if it feeds on mysis?

 

Don't get a mandarin, there life is more valuable than a few zoos. You don't even know what is really eating your zoos and like I said, pods don't eat coral so I'm betting your corals are dying and pods are doing what they do. What looks like a good pod population to you will be a snack for a mandarin. Your tank is way to new as well. Just because someone says the Mandarin is eating mysis really hold no value. Just because it took a few pieces doesn't mean it will solely eat mysis. Your fish will eat the mysis before the Mandarin will have a chance. Your tank can't handle the bioload that you'd create from feeding mysis several times a day.

 

Ok, but i really dont understand whats happenning.. the other zoas are looking healthy...

 

if you get a mandarin with the idea "ill train it" you've already lost..... unfortunetly DSC is right on target with his advice, you have no guarentee the madarin will only eat Mysis and even if he did he would be easily out competed .

 

Might only add a pair of mandarins then, no other fish.. will only buy if they feed on mysis or else wont..

 

Nano, why do you even bother asking questions if you aren't going to listen to solid advice from experienced and established reefers?! Everyone here who has said DO NOT get a mandarin is spot on. Even when ORA was tank breeding them and training them to eat frozen, they still needed pods. The frozen feed is just supplemental. Unless you are cultivating pods in a dedicated system, you're going to kill a beautiful fish. Mandarin take extreme amounts of care and by even mentioning that they might be a solution you are demonstrating that you don't know enough and haven't done enough research to take care of one.

With that said, I had the same problem you are facing. For the longest time I thought pods were eating my zoas. Seriously, I had the exact same problem as you. Zoas would look healthy and then one by one they would close up and have pods all over them. What I discovered was happening was the zoas would close up because they were starving and the pods would go to work and eat them up. That's what pods do, man, they clean up. My PO4 test kit showed 0ppm but most kits don't have a low resolution so I assume I couldn't possibly have actually stripped my water of PO4. PO4 is critical for all life in your tank. The window is really small too. You're looking for something in between 0.005ppm and 0.03ppm. Most test kits aren't any where near that low resolution. So I bought a Hanna ULR (ultra low resolution) phosphorus kit. Guess what I found... I had 0ppb PO4. ZERO PARTS PER BILLION. I was slowly killing everything because I'd stripped the water of nitrates and phosphates. I had to pull out all of my carbon and phosguard, shut off my skimmer, and feed my tank. Within days things started improving. I'm still working on restoring my levels as everything has been deprived for so long that it sequesters the PO4 as fast as I can add it to the water column.

The point here is you need to get a low resolution PO4 kit and determine if you've stripped your water. I bet you have.

 

What's your current water parameters?

 

I say don't get a mandarin and now you say you'll get two? I'm done