I have been getting messages asking how I was able to feed my dragonets frozen and pellets. This is what I did.
First I bought Reef Nutrition Live Tigger Pods. ALL dragonets love these. The other pods may be ignored. For example, my mandarin ignored tisbes, which are pods that dragonets supposedly go crazy for. Tiggers are your best bet. Besides, you don't want the pods to hide. Instead, let them eat them all. The reason for this is that you want them to get familiar with the color and shape. This is an ABSOLUTE MUST if your dragonet is starving with a sunken belly. Regardless of that, you still want to feed them tiggers and make sure they eat it all. My mandarin can eat a whole bottle of RN Tigger Pods in a day.
Next, you want to buy frozen or refrigerated food that's in the orange-red color spectrum. RN Arcti Pods, LRS Fish eggs, PE Calanus, Nutramar OVA, and Rod's Coral Blend are good examples. The one that works best is the RN Arcti Pods. They look like tiggers and are fairly large size for them to see. If your dragonet is really small (>1"), then use PE Calanus. Usually they're big enough to eat Arcti-Pods tho.
I turn off all the flow and I squirt some Arcti Pods (or other orange foods) on a place where the dragonet spends most of their time hunting. Mine likes to hunt around a certain rock, so I squirt it on the sand around there. If you have fish that loves to eat, feed them first. I do this 3-4 times a day until it eats. This may take multiple days or even weeks unfortunately. But usually days. Which is not a big deal since it takes a lot longer than that for a mandarin to starve to death, so you have some time, but don't get carried away. Mine ate it in a few days.
Once they start picking at it, congratulations! You converted your dragonet to eat frozen. You can start adding to the food to make a mixture. I have a cup that contains many different foods and I thaw and refrigerate it. That being said, food spoil quicker in refrigerators, so make sure you have enough to feed a week or so per blend, no more than 2 weeks. Which is like a 100 ml cup. I squirt around 3 ml of the food blend per feeding, so around 9-12ml a day, it lasts me around 10 days.
However, this is still not an easy task. Mandarins have VERY high metabolism. You must feed it at least 3-4 BIG meals a day, evenly spaced throughout the lighting period. If you have a decent pods population, you can get away with less. What's most important is that their bellies are fat and full throughout the day. 4 or more feedings will absolutely make sure that it is full throughout the day without the need of pods. Under that will depend how much pods you have in your tank. Temperature also plays a factor, I keep my tanks 76-77, not over 78.
From the video above, you can tell that my mandarin knows when it is feeding time.
Scooters are the easiest dragonets to feed. Then the spotted mandarins are the next. Green and Red mandarins are actually pretty difficult.
