i got this new fish help ID

Reef Nutrition - Tigger-Pods®

 

this is how I've seen people save them and get them eating frozen food, but it's expensive and not always going to work. Put them in a quarantine tank and feed them a bottle of tiger pods mixed with live brine-shrimp every day as well as switching out a ball of cheto from your fuge (if you have one) daily. If it makes it two weeks on that you can start adding a little bit of frozen brine shrimp to the mix, and hopefully it will accidentally eat some of the frozen. If it eats a little of the frozen it will start to go for it most of the time.

 

Thanks all for the help, he survived through the night. i tried to feed him some frozen, i think he ate some. he looks better now and swimming from a rock to another picking on them. i used an eye dropper to spray some frozen food infront of him. he swam toward the mist and was picking with his mouth. i donno if that means he is actually eating or sampling.
i have brine shrimp in the breeder now they will start popping tonight and im gonna pass buy an lfs that has the pods that Sushi Girl posted (thank you) and get some.
i'll put the dragonet in a breeding net with some chaeto for couple of weeks to monitor the feeding and hope this works and it bounces back.

 

another thing, is there a way to tell if this is a male or female?

 

this pic from today

 

You're welcome, and glad to hear it survived the night.
Males have a longer, pointer dorsal fin and females have a shorter, more rounded one.
I may have missed how big your tank is? Not sure about the breeder net unless another fish is threatening it? These fish pick pods off the rocks all day long (basically grazing), non-stop, so not sure what restricting it in a breeder net would do to it.

 

My tank is 75g with about 90lbs of live rock. about the breeder net it is mentioned in the following website:
Breeding the Green Mandarin - Microcosm Aquarium Explorer
posted by Thepanfish
I'm assuming it is to control the food supply to the fish.

 

Interesting, and that was the only reason I could think of for putting it in there. I would think the challenge would be keeping enough food in there for them, though, since they're not really "gorge-then-not eat for a day" type of fish. The article didn't really seem to go into it, it just said he used one to wean them off of live food with no details of how or for how long, or what they ate in there when he wasn't feeding them directly.

 

Honestly, I didn't think your Mandarin looked all that bad. Unfortunately, I've seen much worse. If you can find it, Nutramar Ova is an excellent food for Mandarins. It's one of the foods that the ORA feeds theirs. Way cheaper than buying pods.