Pods for Mandarins

[ScubaSteve]

And I second Naesco on not having competing fish. In my new tank I'm not doing a mandarin because I would like to have a leopard wasse which will compete with the mandarin for food.

[dc4]

Tigger pods are useless, Ive bought a few bottles before and they dont last a day in the tank, even after adding at night and in the sump. The main issue is that they do not hide and are eaten up by everything else in the tank and dont survive long enough to reproduce. I have used a few bottles of reef pods copepods (tisbe?) to seed my new tank when I transfered to my new tank and now my pair of mandarins are doing great. Dont waste your money on tigger pods for mandarins though, most of the other tankmates will get to them before the mandarins do.

[daniella3d]

Tiger pods won't survive in our aquarium very long. It's a total waste of money.

The best way to handle a mandarin is to have pods to begin with..so wait until you do. Buy cheato and put a refugium or something similar where they can reproduce. They need phytoplankton to survive.

Then you get a new mandarin and put it in QUARANTINE! while in quarantine with liverock and pods, train it to eat something else. Fish roe (caplan eggs) those orange eggs that are found on sushi is excellent for them, and live white worms which they go nuts for.

I have 2 mandarins now, my first male was killed by a yellow tang, and all 3 of them ate live white worms and loved them.

My male now is eating spirulina brine, live white worm and pods. I enrich the white worms by adding Selcon to the milk and bread I feed the worms. I have been feeding my madarins with this for 2 years and my copperband has been eating these worms almost exclusively for a year now.

No way you're going to lose a mandarin from starvation if you give it live white worms. I have never seen a fish refuse that food.

You buy a live culture and get it going...it's easy, good and cheap food for healthy fish.

[doch]

Hmmm... where would one buy a live white worm culture? How big are the worms?

[daniella3d]

It's not a good time of the year to have one shipped to you but in spring you could probably find someone how has some and willing to ship some to you.

Google live white worms for info on them and how to culture them. It's quite easy. They are about 1 inch for the adult, much smaller for the babies so just about any fish can eat them.

Originally Posted by doch

Hmmm... where would one buy a live white worm culture? How big are the worms?

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

My sump/refugiums are usually overrun with pods and live mysis shrimp. Even my little 5g holding tank for Hawaiian volcano shrimp is crawling with pods and mysis. I usually keep balls of chaeto and other macroalgaes in each system (whether in the display or in the sump/refugiums) and so when I transfer rock and stuff from my sump/refugium into a new tank, it seeds that new tank with pods/mysis. I guess I've been very fortunate since it sounds like most reef tanks have little or no pod/mysis population. Been thinking of tearing down the little 5g but haven't mainly because of its unexpectedly high biodiversity. I don't see the Volcanos all that much but the free pods/mysis are overrunning the tank. Just left the tank alone and bam, population explosion. I guess it helps that there are no fish in there any more and the Volcanos are algae eaters.

[ensquire]

Originally Posted by doch

Hmmm... where would one buy a live white worm culture? How big are the worms?

Try Ken at BWA