Green Mandarin questions.....

If I had a 6gal refugium specifically designed to breed copepods.... with my setup....
would there be enough food to support one, or possibly a mated pair of green mandarin???
(the poor guy at the LFS is getting really tired of washing my nose & finger prints off of his mandarin tank!)
Ive read some places that they dont require a large tank
(Scott W. Michael pocket expert guide says 20gal; liveaquaria.com says 30gal)
althou some of y'alls threads say no less than a 100gal. :-[
I'd be buying a bottle of copepods every week or so until the refugium was spitting out enough to support however many they eat a day.
Thats where I'm stuck thou... I dont know how many they would consume and buying a bottle of 1000's of copepods, I just dont know how long they would last....
don't worry.... I'm not picking them up anytime soon.... I just want more information before I bring them home (in 2 months :-[ )​

 

Hmmm...Well, I am not sure the number eaten per day is...but you could always keep buying the copepods...maybe bimonthly.

 

Not alone with the fuge. However, if you're willing to do alot of work you could easily. Find a male and a female (probably separately) that will eat mysis (ask your LFSs). I'd supplement with tigger pods often, or for more work I'd culture them yourself.

I think on melev's reef he shows how to culture them. You just need a small tank predator free that you can dose lots of phyto to These require lots of water changes and and air pump of some sort.

Also see

http://www.melevsreef.com/mandarin_diner.htmlcopepod

Melevsreef.com - Mandarin Care

 

90g tank min. with 100#'s of live rock and a refugium to keep them alive if they are not eating supplement food. IMO, I think that overall their survival rate in captivity is very low and they should be left in the ocean. In a 40g tank they will decimate the pod population fairly quickly. In that pocket guide you are talking about, it says they can be kept in a 20g tank if they are eating vitamin enriched brine shrimp and black worms. I even doubt that claim. Those are not its natural foods and they provide little nourishment for them to survive very long. Now others may argue against me, but most people who have success with them have very large tanks.
Research them at wetwebmedia.com

 

i also have questions about a mandarin... actually, a concern of the fish size/recommended tank size.. if you have a 90 gallon tank with at least a hundred pounds of liverock, the chances of you ever seeing a 3 inch mandarin that usually hides under rocks/in crevices are slim to none, so in my opinion a mandarin would be just plain stupid to have in the aquarium... i mean, my LFS has a mandarin in a small tank (probably 20gal), and you can sit and watch the tank for an hour, and only see the fish for a few seconds of that hour... so imagine the same fish in a much bigger aquarium.. unless you're a big "where's waldo" fan, you'd end up forgetting that you have the mandarin.. that's just my theory, i could be wrong...

 

don't get me wrong, i would absolutely love to have a mandarin, but not if i'd almost never get to see it..

 

Actually I love mine in the 180gal. More so than when it was in a 75. I put in a scooter blenny as well and will add a few more. I find that because the tank is large you spend maybe 15 sec but never more looking for them as they never hide. Once you find them they are a blast to follow around because they are so active. You will see them float from one structure to another like a flying squirrel and will even run into my 7in yellow tang. What is even more entertaining is every time I have company they are always looking for the "pretty tiny fish that is scared of nothing." Neither of mine eat brine shrimp.

I think you can get away with one in your 40 if it has been established for a good amount of time. Just make sure you start out with a small one and if it starts getting skinny see if you have the oppertunity to bring it back to the LFS. Just my thoughts.

 

Breeding copepods in a fuge is a great Idea, but if you need to pump the water back into the tank there is little hope for the copepods to make it past the pumps impeller.

personally I would start with the tigerpods to keep the levels up and then introduce Marc's mandarin diner and keep the tigerpod population up until your happy the fish are getting enough frin the diner

J