mandirians
 

my firends just bought a mandirian goby does any one out here have any advice? they have a 45 gal and there are tons of copods and all that and he sseems to enjoy eating these. just wondering what else they eat what they like / dislike

A mandarin is not a goby. It is a dragonet. It is a common mistake to call them a goby however. This should help you do some information searches on line.

Which type do they have ?
Pterosynchiropus splendidus or Synchiropus picturatus ?

I am fortunate because my mandarin (Synchiropus picturatus) eats mysis, homemade food, even shrimp pellets, and had no problems feeding. Quite often, a mandarin is too far gone at the time of purchase and simply fades away nutritionally. They are continually eaters, and sleep virtually comatose, exposed and vulnerable. Fortunately, they have a toxic slime that is not palatable to some predators.

I have yet to see a fish harass my mandarin dragonet.

hrrrm it is mostly red and not green i dont know if this helps but it seems to be ok within 2 minutes of being let out of the bag it started eating copods

apparently the vast majority of them never accept any foods other than copepods. bob fenner and the WWM guys feel that in any tank smaller than 90 gallons, a mandarin will starve eventually, as it will reduce the pod population to the point that there is no reproduction going on. they say that even in a 90 gallon, it is difficult to maintain a mandarin for a significant period of time.

obviously, see if it will eat any prepared foods. think about adding a fuge for pod production. to me this isn't a "well, let's keep it and see what happens". enough people have tried to keep these and failed. i know a local who just killed two of these guys in a row, trying to keep them in a ~50 gallon tank. they eat all day, and a mind-boggling amount of food at that. another case of beauty being a dooming quality. better left to those with the resources to properly provide for them.

to reaffirm what deb said, they are neither a goby nor a blenny. there are apparently two types of dragonet, psychedelic and manderin. they are identical except in patterning. both are equality beautiful and equally difficult to keep alive.

they are thinking about gettinga 33 gallon fuge would this produce enough ? and what foods should they try? nori mysis

They should try taking it back to the store and trading it for a book.

To add to all of this there are more than two types of dragonets.

Scooter "blennies" are another type of dragonet that we get in this hobby. Starry dragonets are another(similar in appearance to the regular scooters we see).

I read a survey/study on RDO or RC, forget which, that stated that a 40g tank seems to be the cutoff for survivability in mandarins. If you had a mature tank over 40g, your likelyhood was good in keeping one alive. This assumed no other competition for the available food.

My mandarin eats 90 % pods. Every now and then it will eat the mysis that I put in the tank for my other inhabitants. Look into a refugium or pod piles if your friend wants to keep it alive. Unless they were lucky enough to find one that eats mysis on a regular basis. One in a million.

Chris

i am in agreeance here. i do not think it will survive in the long term. to me, success with an animal in this hobby means keeping it for as long as it would survive in the wild, not two or three or even five years. i would not trust a survey of typical reef aquarists to tell me how big of a tank is required to keep these guys alive. i do not think the friend is ready for a mandarin.

What would you trust then? Personal experience? A fishie book? I think a survey of 40 or 50 mandarin owners would be a rather reliable source. Should I take mine back and trade for a book also?

sorry mate, didn't mean to sound hostile there. i'm just suggesting that i would rather follow the recommendations of the "experts" (grain of salt there, of course), who've spent many years studying these animals, versus a group of hobbyists, who mean well, but of whom many are making inferences and judgements based on flawed logic. i expect out of that 40 or 50 who responded (i am not familiar with this poll), a fairly high proportion are perhaps basing their logic on their relatively short time in the hobby, are attempting to justify their own keeping of the fish in such a small tank, perhaps for a rather short period of time, etc. unfortunately, it is adaptive for human beings to summarize and make assumptions - however this means that often, statistics are skewed and are based on shaky (content) validations.

let me assert that i have never kept a mandarin, and that i am very much a newcomer to this fine hobby as well. however i feel i have done a fair bit of research on dragonets in particular, largely due to my desire to understand why an individual i know managed to kill two in the course of a few months. i am basing my judgements completely on second-hand experience, the majority of which i feel to be the result of reliable and valid tests. that said, i would be happy to see evidence suggesting the smaller tank sizes mentioned may in fact be sufficient for keeping a mandarin for an extended period of time. :biggrin:

Had mine from the very beginning 1.5 years ago. She's overweight (see bulge) and there are still too many pods running around the tank. Its a 38G tank (No refugium). What do you mean by flawed logic? I find that statistics are skewed on the pessemistic side. In other words, there are lots of people who are in the hobby temporarily or aren't serious and they tend to kill things and thus you get statistics that have high failure rates.

http://www.hyperdream.com/~samw/reef...36_img_std.jpg

http://www.hyperdream.com/~samw/reef...35_img_std.jpg

I suppose I should add that the respondants to the poll/survey did not all indicate success in keeping mandarins. I think more of them actually lost the fish, and in indicating tank size, seems to point at the 40g as being a boundary in the success/failure of long term survival. Of course other aspects were included such as maturity of the tank, amount of LR, etc. All else being equal, the 40 still seemed to be a cutoff point.
Sam, I think we can squeeze the 38g under the wire :biggrin:

I also like to argue against anyone taking a fish back to a LFS. The new owner can and may take steps to ensure the health of their new charge...the LFS almost certainly won't. Might as well smash a big rock on it's head (no offence Bev) rather thatn take it back to the store. The last place a fish should ever be is in a pet shop...nasty places!! :razz:

i'm not really up on stats, i don't actually take a formal stats course until next fall. simply put, it's too easy for the results of these polls to be skewed.

however, i was not familiar with many success stories involving mandarins in smaller tanks. i may have to reevaluate my opinion on this. :smile:

edit:

upon reading reef_rafs update, i must comment. as noted, i am not familiar with this poll. however if the majority of the respondents said "i had a mandarin in a ~40 gallon tank and it died", and one or two individuals said "i have one in a ~50 gallon and it's healthy", this does not prove that 40 gallons is the cutoff. as an example, a survey in canada must include the responses of 6000 individuals (as i recall) to be counted as valid. a survey of 50 individuals is hardly representative.

as for returning fish, let me explain why i support this action - understanding that the conditions at the LFS are worse than in the aquarists tank, and that the fish will be purchased by yet another misinformed hobbyist, i feel by returning the fish, you are making a statement to the LFS. this also means you become yet another informed hobbyist. the more informed hobbyists, the less fish will die, the less will need to be imported, the less will be removed from the reef. this may be a little extreme, but in the interest of maintaining adequate reproductive stock to provide for future generations, i feel it is essential. of course, i also feel the government should institute a permit system for individuals wishing to keep animals - i think i could almost be classed as an extremist - but it is the responsibility of human beings to take care of the creatures we share the planet with, not to abuse them. being educated is the first step.

all of a sudden, a discussion over a mandarins survival in a smallish tank becomes a debate over the ethics of pet-keeping. :rolleyes:

I think (my opinion of course) that you have too much free time. :eating:

Spot on, old chap. :multi:

i have a desk job. and i type quite quickly.

teevee, by the statement "but it is the responsibility of human beings to take care of the creatures we share the planet with, not to abuse them", I expect you'll be selling your tank? Keeping ANY fish in a glass box, regardless of size, is abusing that animal....period.
Since I'm not an extremist AND I have a selfish streak, I can live with providing what I pretend is adequate living quarters for my living decorations; since you are an extremist (self-proclaimed) and apparently feel that it is your responsibility to care for these creatures, why do you have a glass cage for them? You aren't a biologist, and you most likely won't contribute any new knowledge to the scientific community by keeping captive animals. You will learn a lot more by watching reef shows on TV and reading books about them.
Basically, you want to have a cool looking decoration with moving things in it.

Please don't take this personal, as I am attacking all hobbyists. There is so much hypocrisy in this hobby and I get annoyed by it. If the hobbyist claiming to love these creatures so much actually did, the last thing they would do is cage them in a box.

Did I get off track from the mandarin thread? Sorry :razz: I just have some free time on my hands today....

we've all got free time. except bob. he strictly rations his canreef posting time, day by day.

of course i agree, i am a bit of a hypocrite (maybe more than a bit). and i think this discussion has lost all direction and is rapidly sinking into two people defending notions they can't define :razz: but i guess it's at matter of not keeping the fish at all, keeping the fish in relatively comfortable quarters, or keeping them in stressful conditions until they succumb. so i guess i still feel that regardless of how big the tank needs to be, the hobbyist should research their livestock before they buy.

come to think of it, most fish aren't too smart. i think *some* lack the capacity to understand their circumstances. most of these animals operate almost completely on instinct... of course, this negates my entire argument... so how about them there playoffs eh?

)Well I was not going to dive into this one at all but I have to say a few things.

We all keep fish because we think they are cool. I hope that we also care enough about the enviroment that we do things like buying from reputable LFS and getting as many frags as we can and enjoy watching them grow and make our tank look great. Doing a little reading about any live creature is important and should be done for everything be it fish or not (my wife is pregnant right now, and you think fish are expensive!).

All I am tring to say here is that enjoy the hobby try to make it fun for you and others and learn a bit on the way.

Now just to make sure that I am not going off topic :smile: I did keep a manderin with very little live rock (30lbs in a 135gal tank) and it did very well and got very fat.

Everyone have a great DAY (PS I am also very slow at work and did not like the out come of the oilers game oh crap I am in the Calgary forum...well mabie the flames will make it next year :sad: )

is that a hard fish to keep i had one a while back it was really heathy, and one day it was dead and i tested the water and it was prefect. not to sure why it died.

Pete, yes, they can be difficult to keep due to food requirements. I think the beginning of this thread mentions that.

hey guys thanks for all the replys i am just sitting down now to read em but i see tons so thanks :)
also i dont think they will return it

well the general consensus here seems to be that it has a good chance. tell your friend to review their options and take the course they see as most fitting. just watch to ensure that it stays fat. when they're staving they look like you would expect an anorexic fish to look, you can see their bones and such. go down to pisces, they have a few case-in-point mandarins. good luck to them!

I too have some free time, and enjoy a good discussion. So I will jump in by saying that you are applying human values to an animal with the brain size of a pencil eraser. Therefore the term "Happy" is misplaced. My feeling is that fish live their lives by instinct, and if the animal is well fed, and placed in half decent surroundings its comfort level is satisfied. As we are unable to talk to the animal, we can only look at behaviour to determine if indeed it is "happy". I would be so bold as to say that the size of the glass box we keep it in is of very little concern to most fish (except Tangs, which even I will not try to keep in a tank less than four feet)

All this in my mind was verified by a 10" French Angel, which lived in the large display tank at Pisces. One day that tank broke, and that fish survived. They put him into a 72 gallon tank, where he spent the next year. The fish looked quite comfortable in that small tank. When the big tank was repaired the angel was put back in. To this day he still looks "happy"

As I said this is all very subjective as the objects of this discussion can't tell us anything. :agrue:

i am in agreeance, except perhaps in the case of the larger fish, especially puffers and triggers, who to me seem extremely intelligent. my main concern here is not the comfort of the animal as much as it is the survival of the animal. the idea is to reduce losses in captivity, and thereby reduce captures from the wild. but of course you are correct in saying that we cannot know how the fish feel. however developmental psychologists will confirm that behaviour is influenced by environment, and therefore we can make deductions based on the actions of the animals. in the psychological sense, one could almost define dying as a behaviour (in the same way that a plant growing is classed as behaviour). we can assume therefore that dying prematurely says something about the environment the lifeform was contained in.

dear god, someone please help us. :eek:

Again you are partially correct, but to go into this deeper would defeat the whole purpose of the thread. Therefore I will leave it be until a more propitious moment. :mrgreen:

come on bob, you obviously know something about the philosophy of ethics. let us in on it! :cool: maybe a lounge topic?

FYI..

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/agreeance.html

uh,oh.....Brad's turning into Bob........... :scramble:

Mitch
:mrgreen:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh......:eek:

I have been biting my tongue, and other appendages for quite some time now, and not jumped all over people for the errors they make. I am very happy to see other folks taking up the cudgel. :onfire: :onfire:

i am using the word as it is defined by at that url. i am far too lazy to check websters, but i assume that definition will be similar. i consider myself fairly intelligent and to have an above-average vocabulary and grasp of the english language, but please do correct me if you feel i am ever incorrect, we're all human, and we never improve if we don't know what needs to be improved. :razz:

"...as it is defined by at??"

Sorry man, I don't need an excuse to quote from The Princess Bride, but if you're going to leave the door wide open...

"That URL" lists your usage as error, BTW. Note the picture of the ass next to it.

:wink:

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/cover.jpg

I was surprised to even find out agreeance was a common error. I have never heard it used before.

:lol:

Thanks Brad - here's another, FTI (for teevee's information).
http://www.abc.net.au/wordmap/rel_stories/slippage.htm

:lol:

Sam - I love that cover; it's got my favourite one right on it!

You mean expresso?? That's when they make coffee really really fast :razz:

Haha! I'm glad I'm not the only one that caught on to the ass picture :biggrin: I didn't want to start somethin though :razz: