mandarin owners in the area

[snabss]

hi guys,
so i got a great looking mandarin a couple of weeks back. its doing pretty good so far ( i have a 40 gallon tank with 25 gallon refugium), lots of pods in the tank and refuge.

but i still want to try and wean it off the life food and onto prepared food. someone on another forum mentioned this trick:

soak live brine shrimp in garlic and feed for a week or so. then slowly start adding frozen brine shrimp into the mix until its 100% frozen and then soak pellet food in garlic and supposedly the fish will take it.
so suggestion, opinions, criticism !!

plus where can i get live brine shrimp in the SB area? i was thinking about hatching some myself but then waiting for them to get to adult size would need a few weeks.

second questions: how would the mandarin eat the brine shrimp? as in wouldn't the shrimp be too quick for the fish? any ideas on how to make this work, would i need some sort of a brine shrimp feeder or just dump the shrimp in the tank ? has anyone fed bbs or bs to the mandarin?

thanks in advance.

 

[dswong01]

Try reef nutrion artic pods

 

[Horizon Canopy]

try this:

http://www.melevsreef.com/mandarin_diner.html

 

[snabss]

the mandarin diner is for a fish that already eats frozen food mine doesnt. if i put bbs in the doner and put them in the tank they will swim away. plus i dont really need to put the food in a"diner" since there is no other fish in the tank so no competition.

i have tried cyclo-peeze but i cannot tell if the mandarin is eating it, most probably not.
thats why i wanted to start with some live food like bbs. but i just cant fig out how to make it easy for the mandarin to get to them

 

[africangrey]

I read somewhere that mandarin readily takes up the acrtic pods from ReefNutrition, not sure if if they need to be trained to do that, perhaps Gresham can chime in on this.

 

[650-IS350]

Turkey baste the live food to them SNABSS. Turn of your pumps so that food dosn't get thrown around the tank.

 

[snabss]

i am going to try that tomorrow. will report back i just added 15 lbs of live rock to the system, in addition to the 50 lbs i already had. hopefully that would help as well. at the night time i see tons of ampipods but i cant find many copepods i hope they are there.

 

[edsimmons]

yes delsol's method worked for me and now my Mandarin gets very excited when he sees the feeder.It took two week to get to that point but he is a fatty now.I use Myssis and squrt it in front of him when he is out in the open.

 

[darcitananda]

maybe you can make some "pod piles" too, little piles of liverock rubble to really maximize the pod growth in there.

 

[snabss]

heres the update: i used the turkey baster to feed but the fish run away as soon as the turkey baster enters the water talk about being a sissy!
i tried frozen mysis as well as decapsulated brine shrimp eggs. didnt seem like it liked any of those i will try again today


edsimmons: did you use live mysis or frozen? if you used fozen, did your fish eat frozen food before trying the turkey baster?

darcitananda: i made this pod piles yesterday (rescaped the whole tank, plus added some more rock) i have ordered some pods from oceanpods and will seed the pod piles with the new pods.

 

[Newreeflady]

fyi, I depending on the size of the fish, you can probably try just live brine, not baby brine but adult brine. Then you can try going to frozen brine and eventually frozen mysis. This is how I trained the mandarin I had. Circulation that will move the frozen brine so it doesn't just lay on the floor/rock is helpful as I think it makes them think they are alive.

jme,
-A

 

[darcitananda]

sounds like you're doing everything right. i've got my fingers crossed that you can convert him to prepared foods. they are beautiful little fish!

 

[slojmn]

My litlte guy took right to arctic pods...I could see him snapping them up off the bottom of the tank like crazy when I feed them to my micros and acans. He ignores all other prepared foods thus far.

 

[snabss]

another update:
ever since i added the new rock the mandarin seems to be way more active. its swimming all over the tank and comes to the front wall and follows your fingers if you touch the wall. (its so darn cute!!). but it still wouldn't eat prepared food i guess it has enough pods available so its not really interested in trying anything else.

on a side note, the rock i got from another reef has aiptasia!!!!!!! i saw a few of them and nuked them with that white gooey stuff ( just cant rem whats it called). i hope they don't come back or i will have to move my cleaner shrimps from the refugium to the display.


Newreeflady: so where can i buy live adult brine shrimp? the fish is a good 3" or moe long so its an adult fish, i don't think it will have any trouble eating adult brine shrimp if it wants to, and that is a BIG if

slojmn: so i checked all the diff foods i bought for the fish in the last couple of weeks arctic pods is missing!!! i guess i bought the tiger pods from the same company. i will try arctic now. thanks for the advice.

darcitananda: thanks for the support. i have had my fingers crossed since i got the fish.. they are kinda sore now from all that crossing