green mandarin diet

[zentato]

would green mandarins survive without pods to eat? are there any alternatives to their particular diet?

 

[The guppy guru]

would green mandarins survive without pods to eat? are there any alternatives to their particular diet?

mandarins do in fact need pods thought, even if you can train them to eat frozen foods they will always need a little bit just to keep them healthy. if your mandarin isn't eating then you should try buying pods and every day just keep feeding frozen and if your lucky he will eventually pick out some pieces of food.

 

[The guppy guru]

I have been wanting a mandarin but never tried one because I was afraid it would die in my care. Today in our modern world you can indeed purchase captive bred mandarins that will eat frozen food from day one.

 

[The guppy guru]

but you will still need some pods in your tank to give the fish that natural hunting instinct.

 

[vetteguy53081]

Pods is key diet. You. M A Y. get lucky with live brine but no high hopes

 

[Doctorgori]

Really the easiest way I found to keep them was in something full of macro algae. You can wait for a tank to “establish” and get pods, but adding macro algae somewhere will establish a healthy population faster, nothing fancy here, just more habitat. Just the added surface area alone makes for more pods.

 

[ichthyogeek]

would green mandarins survive without pods to eat? are there any alternatives to their particular diet?

There's been a lot of success with getting them to eat things like Nutramar Ova, but it's really hard to get it.

Look up "PaulB brine shrimp feeder", it's a very good way to provide extra nutrition in smaller tanks.

I can't say whether or not they do or don't need pods, there have been no anecdotes that I know of that provided excess food and no pods. I will say though, that there are commercial frozen pod feeds available (Hikari Cyclopods+, PE Calanus, Cyclop-eeze, etc.). People have also had success with creating "mandarin diners" in order to get the dragonets enough food.

 

[xxkenny90xx]

They definately need to hunt and eat pods all day. The only alternative imo would be restocking a brine shrimp feeder 5-10 times a day (which would be rediculas)

 

[josvanmeer]

you can train them to eat frozen or pellets but you still need to have a pod population going in the tank, if you get one later, I would suggest seeding your tank with pods now, and wait a month or two, and when you add the dragonet to start training it on prepped foods immediately.

 

[Agsellers04]

You better have pods... lots of em. And set up a refugium, put a bumch of chaeto, a breeding bottle, and feed them phyto every few days. I just use a hangon breeder box with an air pump and dump the pods straight in there. I have more pods than i know what to do with and my scooter is fat as all getout.

 

[zentato]

do you think i could put the macro algae on the back chambers of my biocube?

 

[Karen00]

From everything I have researched about these guys the issue is that they feed constantly (someone likened them to hummingbirds) so having pods provides them the constant food source they need otherwise they will starve. I have read successes with training them on frozen but again the key is to have access to a constant food supply. As some have mentioned there are feeders that can do this. If they can't be trained to do frozen you will need a large supply of pods. If you can get a captive bred one then the training is done for you but they still need the supply.

 

[reefer024]

I've owned two. One died due to tank crash. So I purchased another, I trained both to eat frozen spirulina brine. Get a long coral feeder baster and everyday squirt some by him. He might bite it then spit it out (that's a start) but keep doing it everyday. He should start to eat them then. It worked for me and he started to put the coral feeder and feeding together and would come straight up to the feeder. Also I added tigger pods, I've heard they are bigger than most and breed well in the aquarium.

 

[reefer024]

Here is my male. He's always fat.