# Mandarin fish feeding?



## Nazz4232

What can you feed them? I dont really know much about feeding pods? what is that? and what else can they be fed?


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## funlad3

Before anything else, I'd like to point out two things.

1. Thank you for researching mandarins before just going out and buying one. You've just saved the life of a fish.

2. Before adding any livestock, make sure you read beginner's level SW books until your eyes bleed. The New Marine Aquarium (Mike Paletta) was the most helpful book for me. The more you read now, the more you save later.


Moving on to your actual question, mandarins are not gobies as their name claims, but actually dragonettes. Dragonettes are often very difficult to keep because, as you've discovered, they strictly eat copepods or amphipods in the wild. Pods are a type of microfauna that resemble small insects, and they are often hitchhikers on your live rock. Copepods are usually too small to see, and amphipods are usually about 1/4 of the length of a dime. 

Dragonettes, as small as they may be, decimate the population of pods in the tank, usually wiping them out all together in just a few months. In a larger tank, mandarins may be able to live and hunt sustainably. This, again, depends on the original pod population. 

Most dragonettes are in fact some of the hardiest fish around, assuming they have enough food to not starve. One solution to their predicament is to buy live pods and add them to the tank once every few weeks. By continuously replenishing their food supply, they are able to hunt without ever completley eliminating their prey. Most people don't do this, as one bottle of pods (enough for between 1 and two months) can cost around $15, often more than the cost of the fish itself!

The one other option you have with mandarins, as well as the rest of their family, is to keep them in the quarantine tank (which should be done with all new additions) and ween them off of pods and onto the closely related mysis shrimp. Mysis shrimp are generally more nutritious than pods, and cost a lot less. Weening them may be difficult, and can take weeks, sometimes months, to do. Sometimes dragonettes will never except frozen food. 

The most successful method seems to be starting out with 100% live food and 0% frozen food, moving the first slowly down to 0% and the latter up to 100%. Occasionally, it is also possible to find a mandarin at the store that is already eating mysis shrimp. If you can find one, snap it up, as they are rare and rather valuable.

With all this being said, good luck on starting your own tank! :fun:


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## Nazz4232

my trusty guy said its been eating brine. It is tank raised which may be why. im not worried about money. So maybe i will just go buy some pods to go with it. how exactly do the pods work?


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## kay-bee

The dragonette search for and consume the pods. 

They're almost constantly foraging for pods to eat. 

In a tank which doesn't have a large re-newable pod population, dragonette's are capable of wiping out a pod population in quick order. I've seen pods become virtually extinct in a 45gal tank by a dragonette in a week's time (the tank was previously teeming with them). 

If the tank doesn't have a refugium or something similar (which will act as a pod breeding zone that the fish cannot access), these fish aren't recommended unless the aquarium is a 75gal+ tanks with lots of rock (=pod breeding grounds).

Excluding less than 24hr-old brine shrimp naupii, brine shrimp isn't very nutritious as a staple food. If the mandarin is eating brine shrimp it may accept mysis shrimp (which are definately more nutritous so I would recommend switching to that). Be advised that dragonettes cannot compete with other fish when it comes to feeding, so if there are other fish in the tank you may have to target feed it.

A dragonette feeding on brine shrimp may still starve to death. It can take 6-8 months for these fish to starve, so unless the owner has had this fish for a good year, the fact that it is eating brine shrimp doesn't mean much.

You can buy live pods in small containers (they're sometimes refrigerated). Just pour them into the refugium and/or tank. The goal is to establish a population that can sustain it's numbers at the rate that the mandarin consumes them.


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## Nazz4232

okay thanks I bought A bottle of pods which I Put into a separate tank. I also poured some into my tank. I am growing them in a sperate tank as we speak so I can keep replenishing them without worrying about them being consumed so fast they can keep up. I have another bottle on the way. which I will pour directly into the main tank


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## bmlbytes

Read this if you will be growing your own copepods.
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2003/2/breeder


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