Yep, and/or set up a refugium.

I like the fish eggs idea that Kurt suggested. You
might want to give that a try.

Wayne Sallee
Wayne's Pets


Add Homonym wrote on 2/26/2007 3:09 PM:
George Patterson wrote:
It's well publicized that live copepods are the only thing that
Mandarins will reliably eat. Well, I have a starving Mandarin in a 125
gallon tank with established live rock. Prior to getting the Mandarin,
I had several diatom blooms, but not since he arrived. I also used to
have quite a few isopods and can't recall the last time I saw one.
I've bought two shipments of copepods so far to try to stock the tank.
The Mandarin just gets thinner.

So, I'm looking at the other inhabitants of the tank. I have some
Chromis, a Firefish, a Court Jester goby, three cleaner shrimp, and a
couple of feather dusters. The dusters are also doing poorly and may
have died. Are the shrimp hunting the pods to extinction?

George Patterson
If you torture the data long enough, eventually it will confess
to anything.


Pretty much anything small and carnivorous/and or omnivorous will eat
pods from time to time (I have seen my ocelaris eat them, and I even had
a yellow tang come out and start gobbling once when I poured a bottle of
tiger pods in to my tank!)

Cleaner shrimp definitely COULD do it, But a firefish would be more
likely. They do like zooplankton. Same for Chromis. They ominvorous, and
will eat zooplankton when available. Even the court jester goby could be
the culprit - they eat small arthropods as well as algae.

I am doubting the main problem is that your pods are getting all eaten,
however. Something may be competeting with them for food in your tank,
thus preventing them from renewing or increasing their population.

Do you have much in the way of small bristle worms, or an overly
aggressive cleanup crew? You need to have a fair amount of deritus
present in the tank for the pods to thrive. Adding supplemental algae
will help as well.

You may want to try culturing pods - 1 single mandarin can clean out a
whole tank quite easily. I used to do this by having a 10 gal with some
small rocks in it which cycled, then added tiger pods to. I'd feed it a
pich or two of spirtulina flakes every other day, and a drop or two of
phytofeast daily. The pods took over in that tank. I'd simply swap small
rocks between that tank and my main tank to feed my dragonettes. (then
again, some of you may recall my dragonette STILL managed to die anyway
- but it certainly was not form lack of pods!)