anthonys51
New member
can any pods go though a filter sock. i know the bigger ones cant, but can the tiny ones or the babies
If you don't have a specialized feeder in the tank such as a Mandarin or a Pipefish then I wouldn't even sweat it. Pods are cool and all but they don't really do anything IMO, they're just there. (or not)
15,000 per day seems a bit suspect. That would be roughly 10 per second.
If it's true then I have a lazy Mandarin because he doesn't eat near that many.
1,500 a day seems reasonable but even one per second is a stretch.
A mandy should be making a successful 'kill' of a pod every 5 seconds to remain healthy. Keeping one in a well-established 50 with 50 lbs of holey rock, and a mature, year-old 20 gallon fuge with another 20 lbs of rock is very marginal. If you meet those conditions and there is no competition for pods, you can do it with caution.
To run the math, there are 86400 seconds in 24 hours...and given 12 hours of dark when it is not eating (it actually eats before the lights come on...that is 43200 seconds of daylight, divided by 5 (every five seconds)---meaning that a mandy eats about 8640 pods a day, or 720 an hour. Two thousand pods, if fed to it in the required concentration, will be eaten in less than 3 hours. If you have a pair---do the math. You need at least 100 gallons supported by a very large, strong fuge with cheato and live rock.
it's always hard to get accurate numbers for things like that, so to an extent they turn in to Fermi problems, but i think those are solid conservative estimates.
more than anything i think they illustrate that how even at low levels buying bags of 1500 or 2000 pods here and there isn't going to be enough to sustain them on its own.
i do not run filter socks in my setup right now, nor did i in the last one. i do this primarily because i don't want to impede the movement of pods around system (i have two tanks sharing the same sump and dragonets in both) so it makes sense to me to allow them to freely flow through the entire system.
i will put filter socks on from time to time for specific reasons, or if i'm doing maintenance, to catch any nasty i am kicking up in the water, but they are the exception, not the rule, for my setup.
if you're talking about a 265 with a 200 gallon sump and all that rock, unless you have some major competition going on, i wouldn't be too concerned about it personally, filter socks or no.
thanks i didn't think it would be a problem, but wanted to double check to see what others thought. only thing is my tank i barely ever see any pods. yes my tank is 2 months old, but even my old 57 i never saw a lot of them. i mean i see the occasional one here and there, but nothing like when people say the glass is covered in them or running around the rocks like crazy.
Perhaps you need to do some pretty heavy seeding? I got my mandarin about three weeks ago and for a month before that I emptied one of those 1500 pod packs into my tank every week. So, 6000 pods total over the course of a month.
Right now, in the middle of the day, my glass is swarming with them and my Chaeto looks like it's moving, there are so many.
I also have 150 lbs of live rock, which acts as a HUGE breeding ground.
My yellow tang does not care for chaeto. However your mileage may vary.also will tangs eat cheato. can i grab a club once in a while from my sump and add to my main tank.