Building a Copepod Population?

[SaltlifeHokie]

One of my dream fish is a mandrin dragonet. My tank is new right now and I'd like to wait for it to mature more. Can someone point me in the right direction now to get it ready to eventually have a mandrin? Should I buy one of those live copepods in a bottle and dump in the tank or what? I just want to introduce the fish to the tank with it ready and plenty of food.

 

[Ippyroy]

One of my dream fish is a mandrin dragonet. My tank is new right now and I'd like to wait for it to mature more. Can someone point me in the right direction now to get it ready to eventually have a mandrin? Should I buy one of those live copepods in a bottle and dump in the tank or what? I just want to introduce the fish to the tank with it ready and plenty of food.

I have dumped in numerous bottles of pods myself. From what I understand a good fuge is a great way to get your pod population started and off to the races.

 

[NashobaTek]

I add bottles of pods every few months, just to keep the population up. 3 mandrins are fat and happy.

 

[ThePurple12]

You could alsoget a captive bred mandarin or train one onto frozen yourself

 

[ichthyogeek]

Look into making/buying a brine shrimp feeder in PaulB's style.

 

[Reefing_addiction]

One of my dream fish is a mandrin dragonet. My tank is new right now and I'd like to wait for it to mature more. Can someone point me in the right direction now to get it ready to eventually have a mandrin? Should I buy one of those live copepods in a bottle and dump in the tank or what? I just want to introduce the fish to the tank with it ready and plenty of food.

I have one, she is awesome!

I recently added a fuge to my tank to hopefully deminish how often I have to reseed my tank. Now my fuge glass is crawling with them and I just go in and shake my chaeto and let them get gravity fed into the dt. She is happy hunting all day for food!
You may need to seed your dt and fuge a few times to get a very age population and then randomly seed it afterwards as they eat all day!

 

[Paulie069]

One of my dream fish is a mandrin dragonet. My tank is new right now and I'd like to wait for it to mature more. Can someone point me in the right direction now to get it ready to eventually have a mandrin? Should I buy one of those live copepods in a bottle and dump in the tank or what? I just want to introduce the fish to the tank with it ready and plenty of food.

I mistakenly made a copepods farm in my 10 gal hospital tank once,, I was using tank because my seahorse had babies and I wanted to try n raise some ( H.Erectus) , anyway when they were born I didn’t have BBS ready, but just happens to have a bottle of copepods delivered, so I poured about 2 oz from a 12 oz bottle into tank to hold them off till the BBS were ready. About a week later my tank was overcome by copepods, it was crazy I was giving away bottle after bottle of pods to people for free(must of given 9gals of the tank away) Was pretty cool

 

[Darren in Tacoma]

Copepods feed on phytoplankton and can be useful in keeping populations up, with some caveats. Some very good articles regarding this if you want to search.