Am I ready for a mandarin dragonet?

[JMLewis]

This approach to keeping dragonettes is at minimum best. It is not nearly enough food.

I'm also curios about this comment...

Incase you missed it I'm suggesting that he train them to eat prepared frozen foods and not rely solely on pods. I've had a mated pair of mandarins for over 3 years and there both fat and healthy. There fed 1-2 times a day with Selcon soaked mysis and pick at pods all day.

3 years...both fat and happy...sounds pretty sustainable to me.

What I believe people SHOULDN'T do is buy a dragonet of any type and just throw it in the display and hope he can find enough to eat.

 

[Ngoodermuth]

I think that it is very wise to research and weigh livestock decisions carefully, especially with a notoriously hard to keep species.

However, I don't think that you should let fear of failure keep you from trying. In my case, I happened to find a mandarin that was eating mysis in the LFS. Based on his apparent health and appetite, and the fact that I do believe my system is capable of supporting a decent pod population anyway... I gave it a shot.

If no one took risks of any kind in reefkeeping... we would never learn new methods of sucees.

I agree that one should not buy a dragonet and just hope it can find pods, even in a 75 or larger.

 

[rssjsb]

I'm also curios about this comment...

Incase you missed it I'm suggesting that he train them to eat prepared frozen foods and not rely solely on pods. I've had a mated pair of mandarins for over 3 years and there both fat and healthy. There fed 1-2 times a day with Selcon soaked mysis and pick at pods all day.

3 years...both fat and happy...sounds pretty sustainable to me.

What I believe people SHOULDN'T do is buy a dragonet of any type and just throw it in the display and hope he can find enough to eat.

You can never count on sufficient supplementation with prepared foods to make up for insufficient pod population (I'm not sure mandarins even eat amphipods, but a lot of them in a tank may suggest a healthy population of smaller ones they eat).

As to the suggestion someone else posted, that we would be nowhere without experimentation, let's not get carried away. This isn't an area where not enough is known about these fish and their needs. People who try this in a too-small tank aren't blazing trails on some scientific frontier. They're just taking a chance that they'll get the one pretty fish in a few thousand that will survive under suboptimal conditions.

The OP made the right decision. Without a fuge, a 58 is probably never going to sustain sufficient population to sustain a mandarin. Can it happen? Sure. Is it likely? No. Watching a fish starve in your care is a major bummer. So "fear of failure" is a valid and humane basis for passing on this fish.