Manderin and Culturing Tigriopus Californicus?

[Dr RBG]

I am thinking of trying a Mandarin.

Is this what they eat?
Would it be necessary to culture these outside the tank?
Would it be possible just to add a starter population to the tank and wait for them to reproduce?
I know the fish may be difficult to keep but is so cool looking. I don't want to get one and starve it. The tank is 100 gal. About a year old.


Thanks

 

[LeJeune981]

You should be alright with the existing population.. but adding pods will always help.. from what I understand though.. tiger pods are not the best choice for a manderin.. they swim too fast...
I would recommend tisbe pods

I get a pouch about once or twice a month for my scooters and manderins..

I have a 90 DT with 46 gallon fuge..
Mated pair of scooters blennys in the dt... and 2 very small (less than 1 inch long) blue manderins living in my fuge

Sent from my SM-S907VL using Tapatalk

 

[thegrun]

Does your tank have a sump? A hundred gallon system with a large sump and a big pod population would be at the very cutting edge of what it takes to keep a Mandarin fed. Yes you can add pods to try and establish a solid breeding population, but even if you do it may not provide enough food for the Mandarin. Any wrasses or other strong hunting fish in your tank will out-compete the Mandarin for food and it will starve.

 

[Dr RBG]

thanks

 

[agruetz]

Biota has a captive bred mandarin (https://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=15+1500+5142+5146&pcatid=5146) supposedly it will eat pre-pared foods. I have not actually had one though.

 

[BioNub]

Just wanted to throw in my 2 cents from my experience with the mandarin.

My BioCube was covered with pods, to the point where it bothered me because it made the water look dirty.. they were all over the glass and swiming around, so I thought, I'm gonna get a mandarin and get these suckers! well about 2 or 3 weeks later there were hardly any.. and my mandarin started losing weight and showing signs of starvation, I could see his little bones and felt so guilty. I bought those tiger pods from the store for about $20 bucks each, even got phytofeast to get them to feed and breed and what not but I did not notice any difference at all in the pod population in my tank.

I tried spot feeding my mandarin so many times until I said screw him, I'm going to force feed him somehow and I locked him up in a nursery thing for a few days so I could try to get him to eat frozen or flakes or anything, but failed at that too.. he'll literally be covered in food and will swim through like nothing is there.

so my newest iteration of planning to get this sucker to eat was to hatch my own live pods and get him to eat them somehow... just dumping them in the tank didn't do much for me, they'd swim away before he could get there or he'd come in and blow them away with those crazy fins of his. So I cut the bottom of a bottle and I dump them from the cap end and he swims up the bottle and goes to town (took him like 3 days to figure it out) but I can confirm that he is in fact eating, and now has a ton of food.

Long story short, if I was to do it all over again for the fish and mine's sake I'd go to the fish shop and physically watch him eat frozen or flakes and get the one fish who does. Or know that if he's hooked on life food its probably not going to change any time soon or without any work or patience.

 

[MondoBongo]

T. californicus is one of the types of things that mandarins eat. they like to snack on pods of various sizes, worms, eggs, small shrimp, and just about anything else small enough to eat and slow enough to catch.

in a 100 gallon tank with a sump and no competition, i would feel confident in having 1 mandarin.

the issue with target feeding them (leaving aside the fact that getting to eat prepared food is a roll of the dice, even with captive bred ones) is that they are very much grazers. they tend to eat small, digest fast, and spend most of the day plucking food off surfaces.

this is why it's best to make sure they have sufficient food in the tank already, and treat anything that you get them to eat otherwise as supplemental.

they don't do well competing against other fish for food. either during feeding times, or hunting in the tank. so you'll want to avoid high speed pod eaters like wrasse to help keep your populations up.

really in something around 100 gallons, no competition, with sump, and a normal amount of rock, that should be just fine.

 

[Dr RBG]

Thanks for the advice. Fish I have now are 4 Chromis, 1 multicolor angel, 2 clowns, one anthias, one lawnmower blenny, Would this work with the mandarin assuming feeding was working...

 

[MondoBongo]

Thanks for the advice. Fish I have now are 4 Chromis, 1 multicolor angel, 2 clowns, one anthias, one lawnmower blenny, Would this work with the mandarin assuming feeding was working...

i see no conflicts there.

really most of the concern is with kinds of wrasse. either with outright aggression/territoriality, or the fact that most wrasse prefer similar foods to mandy's, but are much more proficient at acquiring it.

 

[Dr RBG]

Great lets see what happens

 

[Tripod1404]

Just wanted to throw in my 2 cents from my experience with the mandarin.

My BioCube was covered with pods, to the point where it bothered me because it made the water look dirty.. they were all over the glass and swiming around, so I thought, I'm gonna get a mandarin and get these suckers! well about 2 or 3 weeks later there were hardly any.. and my mandarin started losing weight and showing signs of starvation, I could see his little bones and felt so guilty. I bought those tiger pods from the store for about $20 bucks each, even got phytofeast to get them to feed and breed and what not but I did not notice any difference at all in the pod population in my tank.

I tried spot feeding my mandarin so many times until I said screw him, I'm going to force feed him somehow and I locked him up in a nursery thing for a few days so I could try to get him to eat frozen or flakes or anything, but failed at that too.. he'll literally be covered in food and will swim through like nothing is there.

so my newest iteration of planning to get this sucker to eat was to hatch my own live pods and get him to eat them somehow... just dumping them in the tank didn't do much for me, they'd swim away before he could get there or he'd come in and blow them away with those crazy fins of his. So I cut the bottom of a bottle and I dump them from the cap end and he swims up the bottle and goes to town (took him like 3 days to figure it out) but I can confirm that he is in fact eating, and now has a ton of food.

Long story short, if I was to do it all over again for the fish and mine's sake I'd go to the fish shop and physically watch him eat frozen or flakes and get the one fish who does. Or know that if he's hooked on life food its probably not going to change any time soon or without any work or patience.

Did you try to feed frozen food with the same bottle method, like putting frozen pods into it? Because once a fish is trained to a specific routine, it can generally be fed anything as part of that routine. Like from live pods, you can go to frozen pods and from there freeze dried and finally small pellet food.