Can Copepods survive a return pump?

Ah, I see. I would definitely seed it once then, just to see what happens.

I'd just plan on seeding your tank regularly then. I'd recommend you get your pod farm(s) setup prior to getting the mandarin so you know you can maintain them.

 

You can just get a 5 gallon tank with a bubbler and grow them there. Keep salinity at around 19 and syphon the bottom every few days. I would suck all the pods with a baster after doing dips from new stuff and put them in that tank after a few months I had thousands of pods. Now my tank has a lot of pods and don't need to do that anymore. I would feed crushed fish flakes or spirulina powder.

 

I think I'm just going to use an upside down in tank refugium, aka pod condo. Probably drill a few more holes in it.

A mesh bag of live rock that I can easily feed might be enough as well.

 

The biggest thing (and I don't know if you mentioned here) is that depending on the size of your tank, you could still run into problems with the mandarin going through them too fast if your tank is small. If you have a nano, I'd still suggest either a pod farm OR be willing to have to buy pods to seed semi-frequently.

 

+1, are you talking about your 29g cube??? Gonna be hard to keep a mandarin alive in it. Its possible, but I'd wait till your tank is a year mature, make sure you have no other pod grazers, gobies/blennies etc, and I'd farm or seed pod regularly. It can be done, but these fish are hard to keep, it takes months for them to starve, so keep an eye out. Look at some pictures, these guys should look sumo wrestler fat, if they narrow at all, it can be too late. I'd rec a sump system

 

Yeah, he is going into a sump system. The ORA tank raised mandarins are supposed to take normal food so we'll see how that goes.

If that doesn't work out and I can't train him, I'll just have to do farming. Probably not a bad idea in general as copepods are great food for almost all the fish I keep anyway.

 

I'd just start farming now, mandarins don't normally keep on normal food. save your fish