You're not going to like the answer as it defies some convential wisdom.
Those are the only answers I ever like! =D Awesome, I am a bit shocked at the amount of competition, yeah, vs. size tank - but still, there are lots of things that can go on in a system to affect pod production - now what did you feed your pods, anything? Phyto? Just mysis juice?
I always thought it was pretty easy to get mandarins to eat - only maybe one in every ten is just impossible for a couple of weeks and you fear them starving before they start. It has been a long time since I have distributed wild collected fish, or any fish at all, lol - but I used to get mandarins into stores I worked, and then when I had my own store I would get them in, keep them for a couple of weeks and teach them to eat, then sell them...after a few years when I noticed that none of them were alive anymore, I felt too bad to continue...no matter how well they ate, they are dying that fast anyway? What was the point? =(
The way I usually used to train them to eat wouldn't work well in a high flow display - I just buried a piece of frozen mysis in the sand so the top of it was flat with the sand level - in an area with pretty much NO flow. It kind of helps to have another really small fish in there, or a hermit crab or something, that will go up to it and mess with it but not eat it all, just kind of spread it around and make it wiggle a little, lol.
The other way is the feeding box - like another poster described they get trained to the same spot, even your hand or the turkey baster once they are eating. The trick is to get the food to slow down enough for them to catch it, really, so a feeding box that your mandarin can go in to eat where the food won't be whipped away so fast helps - but you have to leave it in there for awhile before they will go in it.
The real key is figure out how you can get the food to stay put and do that in the same place every single time. They have a pretty good memory, and if you put the food in the same place and get it to stay there with nothing else eating it all every day, in less than a week 90% of them eat - and for whatever reason, the one fish out of ten that didn't was always a female. Not sure why, except maybe the males are bolder? Anyway, thanks for the thread, can't help but love these little guys!
Oh yeah, lol - I don't believe there is any pump that will spit out live pods until I see it.
I would pull up a chair for that demo, though! =D
