getting a mandarin to eat
 

As the title says, any tips or tricks? It's in QT, which has no pods at all, but it won't touch the frozen stuff yet. I was thinking I'll go pick up some tigger pods from Wai's for now, but I really need this guy to eat frozen foods. Any tips or tricks from those who've succeeded?

what type of mandarin is it, some are harder to get on foods , in my experience the psychodelic are hardest and targets the easiest:)

very small tank and try lots of food with the flow off , they dont actively hunt in the water column.

you can also stuff a small piece of liverock my small , very small mysis.

ive had luck with cyclo as well in the past.

Just curious why you purchased a fish that is known to starve to death most of the time because of an inadequate food supply if you knew you didn't have appropriate food?

If you absolutely need it to eat frozen food you should probably take it back to the store as most will never reliably eat frozen food. I've been told that is why ORA blue Mandarins aren't available. They can't get them to reliably continue to eat pellets or frozen once their customers have them in their tanks.

Also Mandarins aren't generally fans of Pelagic Copepods but maybe the Tigger Pods will keep them from starving?

If you can keep it from starving to death in the short term you could check out videos on youtube by others who have trained them to eat. I believe Melevsreef.com has a diary of how he trained his to eat as well. It is worth trying, just remember there is no guarantee your Mandarin will respond positively.

Get some live pods. Target feed it several times a day putting a few in front of him when he is resting on a rock. They can learn that the tool you use to feed them brings food. Put as much live rock in the tank as possible. Put a bunch of cheato in. Gradually add frozen to the live and one day you will see him suck it in. The trick is to have enough for him to hunt to keep him going until he learns to eat frozen. Choose as many types of frozen (small) as you can find. Cyclopeze and roe (eggs) will fit into his mouth easily. last but not least find one that is already eating and put him in to teach him.
good luck :biggrin:

Yah it's a psychedelic. Why are the coolest ones always the hardest? It's in a 15 gallon QT tank by itself so I'm trying the cyclopeeze and tiny mysis route. I'm also trying to harvest pods from my tank but it seems as soon as you actually want them to be crawling all over your hands they suddenly start channelling Houdini.

Because there's more than enough to sustain it in my 2 year old 275 gallon tank with cryptic refugium, but there's not enough tea in China for me to put a fish in my tank without some sort of a quarantine procedure. I do the tank transfer protocol on every single fish, which means my two QT tanks are emptied and dried twice each during QT and left dry between new additions, so there's no opportunity for pods to grow in them. Risk to my other fish aside (and that's a risk I'd never take anyway), I'd rather take the minimum 12 day tank transfer period to train it on frozen foods than have it go in to a tank where there's something it would rather eat and then never learn to eat frozen.

I think it's important for all fish to learn how to eat prepared foods if they're going to survive long term in a tank. I have control over how much of that goes in to the tank, I have no little to no control over the pod population beyond what I've already done to encourage their reproduction. So far I'm at the 1 year mark on a copper band butterfly, 9 or 10 months on 3 purple queen anthias, and I've returned an utterly emaciated, near death powder blue tang to full health, all fish that are known to have miserable success rates in captivity by taking the quarantine time to train them on a well-rounded captive diet, which is what I'm trying to do with this guy. If he's not going to eat them for me, he likely would have starved to death in someone else's tank anyway.

Yah I tried to track down some tigger pods today. The only two stores that I know carry it are out. According to Wai's he hasn't been able to get ahold of the supplier in a few months. I'll check out the Melev's reef blog. I know it's no guarantee, but if he can at least make it through the QT period my hope is that in time he'll figure it out in the big tank. When I feed I turn my return pump off and my vortech's go in to feed mode so a ton of food ends up hitting the sand bed, which seems to be necessary for both my copper band and my slow-as-a-golf-cart cowfish to get enough food, so this guy won't have to compete too hard for food in the display if he can only figure out he can eat it.

Do you know what size of pod they generally prefer? My glass is literally crawling with the really small kind that nothing else in my tank eats if I don't wipe it down with a magnet every day, so I can get a bunch of those out no problem. It's harder to get the amphipods out in any reasonable numbers because they're so good at hiding during the day, but I've built a pod pile for them in one corner of my tank.

Ive got mandarins onto frozen blood worms twice now , I had a 15 gal nano that was just for my mandarin and it had a lot of pods but I fed blood worms every second day from a pipet . Had them to the point where they would swim to the pipet and feed from it .

oooh, blood worms, that's a good thing to try. I just remembered that my overflows have been developing nice thick carpets of hair algae at the water's surface, so I pulled a chunk out. There's hundreds of pods, amphipods, and mysid shrimps crawling around in the mat so I put some in the QT tank. So far no reaction from the dragonette, so he's either not figured it out yet or he's not long for this world anyway.

I've used live white worms and blood worms. Mine seemed to go after the white worms with more gusto (if you can find them). Eventually start freezing them, then slowly start adding mysis. BOOM! Frozen trained mandarin.

Well this guy might not be 'my' mandarin. At lights out, there were literally two different kind of pods actually crawling right on him. No reaction. There's about 100 of the small kind within 2cm of his nose where he's sitting now and he doesn't even seem to see them. There's zero hunting behaviour at all, which as I understand is a bad sign. Hopefully he comes around tomorrow.

On the upside, giving him live food on a living algae substrate is going to have way less of an impact on the water quality in the transfer tanks.

I have heard that they like salmon eggs. Maybe give that a shot?