Seeding a 120 for a mandarin.

[Casey Gore]

Hey guys. i just set up my 120 with about 100lbs of rock and a 4in sand bed.
I am looking at seeding the tank. I am going to buy the pack off of algae barn pods for mandarins.
My question is, how long should I wait after seeding my tank before I add my first dragonette?
I also have a sump with a fuge housing chaeto and a bunch of rubble. Also is a 120 large enough for a pair that would just be surviving off pods?

 

[dantimdad]

Conventional wisdom is to wait a year or more.

But, check out thecoralreeftn.com They have tank raised ones that eat their pellet food that they make.

I have seen them in person and they are gorgeous.

 

[BestMomEver]

Yea... wait.... I have bought 4 mandarins through the years. None survived. And I putt them in well established, aged reefs of 500, 300, and 125 gallons. Why can’t I keep them? No idea. I’ve tried everything I know to do. I’ve decided I just can’t have one.

I will say that I dump in a bottle of pods every three weeks or so just to keep my six line happy. You can do that, but still, wait a bit.

 

[Billldg]

I dont have any mandarins, but I still have a subscription for pods from algae barn. Between my pink streaked wrasse and corals, I would never see any pods. So I add 2 jars of pods every 2 months

 

[Coral Newbie]

Depends on how long you want to wait and how many bottles you want to buy. I did the BRS 4 month and I think over the course of the cycle I dropped 10-15 bottles. I am shutting down my 45gal and moving everyone into my new 100gal so I spent some money trying to get a pretty large pod population into the tank for my 2 mandarins that are moving. Once I saw them on the walls of my fuge I knew I would be fine. I did a combination of algae barn and reef nutrition.