mandarin eat frozen copepods???

will mandarins eat frozen cyclops if live isnt available? you see i cleaned mt gravel with the siphon and think a large amount of my live food got sucked up, bcuz i cant see any no matter how long i look for signs of copepods/ amphipods.

 

In general they only eat live. Most of the live food in the tank you can not see anyway.

 

They will eat lots of frozen food IF you are lucky enough to have one of the few thats trained to eat it. Most fish can tell very easily if something is alive and if they only like live food they will not even give it a glance. Mandarins are one of these fish for the most part. Do you have a refugium?

 

yeah, but my sump had a crack so everything is turned around. my ref, turned into a sump. ah its ok i got 2000 amphs and cope's coming from ebay for cheap 32 bucks for 2k of them

 

My mandarin eats frozen brine shrimp. It went through a little phase of not wanting to eat when i originally introduced him into the tank, I tried adding pods by squirting them into my live rock all over the tank. Shortly after i did this he began eating the frozen brine shrimp i feed to my other fish.

I put the frozen food into hot water to melt it completely, and then strain all the water out with a straining net. I do this step to ensure that i dont add any tap water into my tank.

 

yep, warm them up and if you can kind of "hide" them in the rocks. the LFS tries to train them when they get them, but they usually sell before they take to frozen.

 

sounds great thanks guys

 

WHY IN THE FARK WHERE YOU VACUUMING YOUR "GRAVEL"

err wait, why do you have "Gravel" in the first place. Do not disturb the live sand. kthx

 

yeah i agree with the above i'm alittle confused. by gravel do you mean crushed coral?

weather its sand or the crushed coral you def. should not be disturbing or moving or stirring or vacumming ANYTHING down there. you'll get a spike and kill something.

 

Dragonette Diet...

We have seen multiple dragonettes (green & spotted) at live fish stores that won't accept even live brine shrimp. After a mandarin from liveaquaria dying on day 2, we shopped around at live fish stores until we found one that looked very healthy and gladly accepted the live brine shrimp when we asked them to test-feed it for us. We also inserted live copepods (Tigriopus sp.) on 3 occasions at about 1½ week intervals. The first was a half-bottle (2000-4000 per bottle, so 1000-2000 that time) and the second and third doses were the whole bottles.

Our Green Mandarin Dragonette is in a (*primed to dodge bullets*) 14g BioCube with a Kelloggi Seahorse. We feed daily using either PE frozen mysis shrimp, live brine shrimp, or H2O Life frozen Cyclops and PE frozen mysis shrimp together. All feedings are enriched with Kent Zoe and Zoecon (5 drops each), with every few feedings being enriched with Kent Marine C (5 drops) and Garlic Extreme (2 drops). They both eat each of these three foods, and eat at each feeding.

Matthew L. Wittenrich, a marine biologist, has an article in Volume 6, Number 1 of Coral magazine (Jan/Feb 2009) about breeding mandarins. In it, he conveys that weaning mandarins off of the live-food-only diets and training them to eat frozen foods that are readily available like PE mysis (which he trusts most) shrimp is a more realistic and successful approach than relying on large mature systems and even refugiums, both of which often result in a slow starvation.

The method used, which he says Matt Pederson of MOFIB developed, is simple: A new mandarin is put in a suspended basket or small quarantine tank and fed enriched live brine shrimp. Then, frozen brine shrimp and mysis shrimp are introduced. After the fish starts eating the frozen foods they gradually decrease the live diet and increase the frozen diet until the fish go after frozen food as soon as it's in the tank. Then they're added to the main display.

I'm not sure what the success rate is on doing this with wild-caught mandarins, but our mandarin has been thriving for months we will see how he does over the next year or so. If Mandy (HOW ORIGINAL!) ever thins out we will start adding copepods at regular intervals, and probably breeding copepods separately (as many here do) to minimize the cost.