mandarin goby

[jeffgalveston]

i added a mandarin goby to my 6 year established 60 gallon reef tank. it has lots of rocks and copepods. i have seen it eating copepods. the question is, will i have to add copepods or will the ones i have repopulate enough to maintain a food source? please advise if anyone knows, thx

 

[SeaDøøby]

Do you have a fuge?

 

[MONTANTK]

It’s never a bad idea to periodically add pods but in a tank that big, especially if you have a refugium, you don’t have to add them often at all

 

[New&no clue]

Do you have other fish that eat pods? If it has competition it’s not a bad idea to add some here and there

 

[jeffgalveston]

i do have a bio ceramic ring fuge. no other fish that eat pods. what frequency of adding pods? and how many at each addition? thx

 

[BaghdadBean]

I had a green spotted mandarin in a 58 gal reef that was about the same age as yours, and never had issues with him. I picked him up on the edge of starvation at the LFS, and watched as he went from emaciated to fat and sassy. I did have a large refugium in the sump though, and I cultured phytoplankton and brine shrimp for frequent supplemental feeding of both the mandarin and the pods. I added new cultures of pods about once every six months, but it might have been overkill along with the fuge and phyto. I eventually ran into some nitrate issues which I traced to the fertilizer I was using for the phyto, so I quit using it and started using tank water to culture it with instead. Probably not “correct” but it sure worked great for me, and I never had a phyto culture crash unless it was from me leaving it going too long. Reading some of the modern phyto culturing manuals sure makes me wonder if I was just lucky, or if maybe things don’t need to be quite so religiously sterilized as recent recommendations claim. About the worst thing to happen was the neighbors calling the cops on me over “suspicious glowing green jars and tubes“. The police officers that came sure were jumpy at first but they calmed down when they got the biology lesson.

 

[davidcalgary29]

My mandarin ran out of pods pretty quickly in my Evo (it shares the space with a pair of greedy orchid dottybacks)...and then apparently decided that mysis shrimp and grindal worms were pretty tasty after all. I really was going to move it into one of my bigger tanks, but decided not to after I saw it hoovering up the mysis.