Don,t bother with tiger pod as they are always free swimming and get grabbed by powerhead, skimmer and coral if you have coral that eat plankton.
For your mandarin, get some masago. Those are the little orange eggs that you can find on sushi. They are caplan eggs. You can buy a little quantity from a sushi restaurant to test it. Both my mandarin love these eggs and Hikari frozen bloodworms.
Mandarin eat fish eggs in the wild so their chance of picking at the fish roe (masago) is very very good.
I have trained 2 mandarins easily that way. Another thing that my mandarins love is live white worms. They are easy to culture. They are rich though, so only 2 times per week NO MORE.
The regular copepods is what you want to see a refugium but if you have a sterile low nutriment aquarium you will lack in copepods in no time. Pods need phytoplankton to survive and a safe place to reproduce. It is best that you train your mandarin to eat frozen. Start with the fish roe, easy enough. Mandarin eat the little copepods but their favorite are the isopods. Those are not available for sale that I know of. Copepods are tiny and you will have to buy tons of them if you are not prepair to train your fish.
I kept my mandarin alive and fat for 6 months in a 21 gallons before I moved him and his little girlfriend into my 75 gallons. So with good food he can live in there for a long time no problem, but don't rely on pods only, this is a sure way to fail.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shingo43
Unfortunately I don't have a sump, and I just got a green mandarin. In this case which live pod food should I buy then?
I have a red sea max 34g and about 40lbs of rock, how long can the mandarin survive before I found new food?
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