Am I ready for a Mandarin dragonet?

[Cerberusfish]

So the answer is...... maybe ;Writing my 2 cent is it wont hurt to grab some jump starter pods and add them (tank and sump) and wait a couple months to make sure. I have got 2 over the years and they both perished. I tried getting them on anything frozen never had luck. They are some of the most beautiful fishies tho

If I just bought a few bottles of pods and added them to my tank and sump at once would that be helpful? Or would that many at once cause issues/just result in large death of what I'm adding? Fish aside or not just trying to find an efficient way to get a bunch of new ones added

 

[Arthacker87]

Imo pods can only be healthy to a tank. I'd give it time so they can grow bigger and reproduce to help with population. I had some the size of a small cricket. Add at night. They are easy to breed in a 5 gallon bucket I did it as a back up for fun.

 

[robbyg]

Man all this talk about pods is really making me miss the breeding pair that I had. They both ate pellets and lived for about five years before the crash! I don’t think I will ever get a pair like that again.

 

[GSnake]

I bought mine after the asking if I can watch them be fed. Sure enough I brought home the one that was eating brine shrimp. I feed him frozen brine now, and am training him on flakes. However I need to feed him with a tube with flow on pause, cause they are the slowest to eat! Joy to keep though

 

[Reef.]

I read they eat something like 6000 pods a day.

 

[OrionN]

Glass top isn’t great. No air exchange but this is not a problem if you have a sump. More of a problem is glass is such a hard surface that many wrasses have fatal head and spine injury hitting the glass when they jump.
I would recommend that you change the top from grass to 1/4 inch screen. They are easy to make using window screen frame and 1/4 inches netting. I got my frame from HomeDepo and screen from BRS.

 

[Bryce M.]

More like 2 years with dry rock

That is the thing now

 

[IndyMatt]

Personally if you want your Pod population to explode dose Phyto. I am dosing Phyto and culturing/adding copepods. I upgraded from a 60G to a 200G in November and don't think I will ready for another few months. Mind you that is with dosing and adding pods.

 

[najer]

I read they eat something like 6000 pods a day.

Well said, it's natural behavior is to eat, each peck = a pod, let's pick 5 as the number of pecks per minute and do the maths, getting them to eat prepared foods is good but they still want to forage all day.

 

[OrionN]

The crustacean that are food for Mandarin reproduce really fast. They are tiny. It really does not take much time to get their population to to reach equilibrium. Everybody who breed fish that need life food know this. Doubling time for pod culture are a few days, not a few months.
Many reefers keep on read and write that it take a year or two to get a tank ready for Mandarin. This is really not base in any logical reasoning or trial or study. On contrary, I can keep healthy Mandarin a 28 gal Oceanic cube tank within a month after I set it up. To do this, one must set it up certain way with mandarin in mind. I only keep a pair of clowns, a Magnifica anemone, and a few corals and clams.

The time the tank have been up is imaterial. How well run the tank, what size and what fish are in it is all important.

 

[TheShrimpNibbler]

I can keep healthy Mandarin a 28 gal Oceanic cube tank within a month after I set it up. To do this, one must set it up certain way with mandarin in mind. I only keep a pair of clowns, a Magnifica anemone, and a few corals and clams.

Would you mind sharing how you do this?

 

[OrionN]

Would you mind sharing how you do this?

I wrote a thread about this on ReefCentral about 10 years ago. I will look at my pictures and see if I can rewrite it over the next few weeks.

Here is a link but the RC upgrade lost all of my pictures. I will looks for pictures and maybe write an article on keeping and feeding Mandarin. Look for it in a month or two.

30 g cube with H. magnifica - Reef Central Online Community

30 g cube with H. magnifica Nano Reefs

www.reefcentral.com

 

[HTXReefer]

I have a 72 bowfront that is about 9 months old now. I have had my mandarin in the tank since October and she is fat as can be. I agree with @OrionN the tank age is less critical than the fish you have in the tank currently. I started my tank from day one with a mandarin in mind. I started the fuge at day 7 and at day 14 started seeding pods. I also started a culture in a 10 gallon tank around month 2 and dos phytoplankton in my DT and Fuge daily. Anyone who has run a successful culture will know that the pod population reproduces at a very fast rate and as long as you don’t have too many pod eating fish the population will flourish. I’m actually having an issue with too many pods and my mandarin cannot keep up with them. I have a wrasse in QT right now that I will be adding to the DT in a couple of weeks to try and keep my pod population in check. So in my opinion it is doable this early in your tank as long as you have the pod population to support the mandarin

 

[IndyMatt]

I have a 72 bowfront that is about 9 months old now. I have had my mandarin in the tank since October and she is fat as can be. I agree with @OrionN the tank age is less critical than the fish you have in the tank currently. I started my tank from day one with a mandarin in mind. I started the fuge at day 7 and at day 14 started seeding pods. I also started a culture in a 10 gallon tank around month 2 and dos phytoplankton in my DT and Fuge daily. Anyone who has run a successful culture will know that the pod population reproduces at a very fast rate and as long as you don’t have too many pod eating fish the population will flourish. I’m actually having an issue with too many pods and my mandarin cannot keep up with them. I have a wrasse in QT right now that I will be adding to the DT in a couple of weeks to try and keep my pod population in check. So in my opinion it is doable this early in your tank as long as you have the pod population to support the mandarin

Why do you think you have too many pods? Age does not matter as much as stability and pod population. After a year, a tank's pod population without seeding is probably sufficient. More of a guideline than hard and fast rule.

I want a ton of pods because I will have wrasse and want mandarins so I want to get them boosted from the get go. Pod populations are limited by food as well and that is why I suggested dosing phyto. Low nutrient tanks I believe limit the pod population to some extent as well. I technically have a low nutrient tank but I believe by feeding fish and dosing phyto it helps the tank overall. Low nutrient plus low input is probably not an ideal situation for pods to thrive.

 

[Cerberusfish]

So update, my sump walls are covered in pods. In my display tank they're much less concentrated but I can see 1 or 2 roughly every 4-6 inches on the bottom half of my tank glass. I turn my skimmer off at night and have started dosing phyto to both places at night to speed up growth. I think i'm making progress.

 

[Clownfish2]

So my tank is about 4 months old which I know is a bit young for this. Not sure how much liverock as I didn't weigh it all but it's somewhere between 60-90 lbs probably closer to 90 lbs. 75 gallon DT with about 12 gallons in the sump (ik it's small but I had to add it after the initial setup and it was the largest I could fit) the sump has only been up and running for a couple days and im using the skimmer compartment as a refugium since I already have a HOB skimmer I like. Added a ball of chaeto (softball size) about 2 days ago. I know I've got a population of pods but I don't know how large. Would you who have more info or experience with them be able to tell me if this sounds like a viable environment for it? Or roughly how much longer I shod wait to get one? I'm considering buying some various pods from various places as I've read it's good to try and get species variety for the fish and I assume that's a good way to get different subspecies in the tank/fudge.

I would recommend growing your own copepods in separate containers for about 6 months so you will have a steady supply prior to getting a mandarin. Dry rock certainly lacks the microfauna diversity for the first couple years.

I grow Reef Nutrition Tiggerpods in 1 gallon glass jars with isochrysis galbana phytoplankton. Has been a constant food supply for my tank.

 

[Cerberusfish]

I dosed a note of heisenberg's aquaculture pods. I'm not looking at the bottle but it had 3 distinct species in it and I can see all three in my sump. I'm thinking I'll dose another bottle to the DT because I poured the whole bottle in the sump and just rinsed out what was left into my DT. But I'm definitely considering growing pods in a jar because either way it looks like fun.

 

[Cdeg]

I would recommend growing your own copepods in separate containers for about 6 months so you will have a steady supply prior to getting a mandarin. Dry rock certainly lacks the microfauna diversity for the first couple years.

I grow Reef Nutrition Tiggerpods in 1 gallon glass jars with isochrysis galbana phytoplankton. Has been a constant food supply for my tank.

Doing anything special for your copepod cultures? Or just jars with, air pump, and phyto? Been looking at the Poseidon reef system, but feel like I'm over paying.

 

[Clownfish2]

Doing anything special for your copepod cultures? Or just jars with, air pump, and phyto? Been looking at the Poseidon reef system, but feel like I'm over paying.

nothing special they are easy after I made numerous mistakes such as not cycling the water with bacteria, not using enough phytoplankton to keep the water tinted, and getting my cultures contaminated with rotifers or micro worms from display tank water ie chaeto or rubble rock.

 

[Cerberusfish]

Update: I've got pods all over the glass for the first 4-5 inches from the sand bed before they start to disperse and some of em are really big. I've also recently started a phytoplankton culture but I'm trying an odd method just to see if it works. If it does I'll let you guys know what I did, if it doesn't I'll do it like everyone else.