okay i can get some live food to put in there but the fish store told me they have frozen cyclopods. would that be a good one to try? but i'll try and tell ya
You can try any food, and you might get lucky.
I'm just telling you the ones that worked for my mandarin.
I will say the live foods have a better chance. Note that you do need to be very careful with some live foods. Foods like live bloodworms will only live a few minutes in SW, so you must make sure they get eaten.
Mine eats frozen brine shrimp which I guess is somewhat rare. I know he eats off the rock as well, but he always comes out a feeding time and if it's brine, he gets his share. Just my experience...
The problem with brine shrimp is that it's not a complete diet, so if that's all a mandarin gets to eat it will still starve.
I completely agree, but there is some nutritional value, and if the mandarin takes to it, it may be enough until either the pod population matures or it takes to something better. Just one more thing to try.
Ok, I'm a newbie at this. My girlfriend and I purchased a 72 gallon bow tank. We've had it running for 3 months now. We added 65 lbs of LIVE ROCK and 40 lbs of live sand in the tank approx. a month ago. We tested our water and our ameonia, nitrates, and nitrites are way low. We just added a green mandarin and have heard that they are very difficult to take care of. But the guy who sold us him said all of that is a myth. Anyone in here have any experiences with this specie?? I love this fish, and i want to have this guy long term.
I got a mandrine he is very lovely but he didn't eat any food I offer him and only nip on sand & rocks .
Another problem is he is very jumpy during first week I found him one day on hangon filter of my QT.
... But the guy who sold us him said all of that is a myth. Anyone in here have any experiences with this specie?? ...
Welcome to RAG!
The guy that sold you the fish lied, period.
Of the fish commonly seen, mandarins are among the most difficult to keep. It is almost an expert level fish.
They usually will not take food you introduce, and require a diet of pods that live on the live rock. I have been lucky, I have gotten mine to take frozen blood worms and live black works, but this seems to be an exception.
I would consider your tank much too new to have a pod population large enough to support a mandarin, but it's hard to tell, because I don't know what came in on your live rock.
If at all possible, return the fish. Maybe in 6 months or so you can add one, if you have an established pop population, and no other fish competing for the pods.
The general recommendation is to not introduce a mandarin into an immature tank, first of all (less than a year old with plenty of live rock and microfauna to eat). I lucked out and introduced my target mandarin after ~2 months because he was male and actually ate mysis shrimp I gave him. Many others have not been so lucky, especially with females.
I populate my tank with peaceful fish: virtually all gobies are good tankmates (I have a hectori, a green, and a few others I can't name at the moment). My other tankmates are a fox-faced rabbitfish, a blue tang, a bicolor blennie, and six blue-green chromis. I would avoid 6-line wrasses, since they are reputed to out-compete mandarins for microfauna.
I have a refugium in my basement filled with little critters, and I frequently slosh some of the refugium water over the weir into the pump section to add them to the main tank. If you shine a flashlight at your tank at night and see a bunch of pods, etc. running around, your mandarin will probabaly be happy.
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