How I got mandarins eating :)

I know that it can be very difficult to get mandarins to eat prepaired food. I managed to do it in less than a week. Now I am very new to the hobby (started in July, 2011) so I may have just gotten very lucky. But just in case it may help someone else, here's what I did...

The first thing I did was to choose carefully which fish to purchase. I've read that the younger you get your mandarin, the more likely they are to adapt to prepaired foods and to the home aquarium. I chose the two smallest and most active fish, one male and one female. It helped that they were already playing togeather through the partition between their holding cubes in the shop. NOTE: Do Not make the mistake I made and purchase a pair of mandarins for a small or medium tank. Most fish dealers will tell you this will be fine just to sell you the fish. However in most cases the poor things will starve to death in your tank because only a very large tank (maybe 125 gallons or so with a lot of live rock) can support a population of copepods large enough to feed these fish. DO NOT count on being able to get them to eat prepaired foods. But if you're learning this after the fact like I did, hopefully this will help.

Be sure to buy AT LEAST 8 bottles of live copepods (I used Tiggerpods) and be sure you have access to at least 8 more bottles within a week's time just in case they won't eat anything else. ALWAYS ALWAYS QUARANTINE!!!! I learned this the hard way. If you can't afford to set up a QT then you can't afford to start a salt water tank. Trust me, you will lose A LOT more money by not doing it than you saved on the QT system. Not to mention the heart ache of losing possibly ALL of your beloved fishies to disease. It's heart breaking to watch them slowly decline and die one after the other that way.

Once they are settled into the QT, add one or two of the bottles of Tiggerpods and follow regular QT procedures. On day 2 add one or two more bottles of Tiggerpods (I used 2 because I had 2 fish). Repeat this again on day 3. The purpose for this is to allow the fish to get settled from the ordeal of being caught, transported several times etc... This will provide them with a lot of nutrition to tide them over until they are ready to eat frozen foods.

On day 4 add one drop per 10 gallons of water of Kent's Garlic Extreme directly to the tank water about 10-15 minutes before feeding. For mandarins, do not soak the food in the garlic since they are such picky eaters. Try a combination of frozen blood worms and brine shrimp to start with. The brine doesn't have much nutritional value, but it is small and tasty to the fish so they are more likely to try it. The blood worms are more flavorful and have more nutrition, but are much bigger than the food they are used to, so it may take a little while. Only use very small amounts until you actually see them eat something. Turn off the filter and be sure to place the food on the bottom of the tank, preferably in a back corner near their hiding spot. I use a medicine dropper, and now both mandarins will come up to it as soon as I put the dropper in the water and wait for the food. Turning the filter off allows the food to stay mostly in one spot so the fish have plenty of time to check it out, they seem to think about it for a while before eating. Position yourself in a spot where you can easily watch the fish and be very still and very quiet and calm ( I swear fish can sense your mood just like other pets). It may also help to leave the lights off in the room, but on in the tank. Watch for at least 10-15 minutes after feeding to see if they try anything. DO NOT add any more Tiggerpods at this time. Repeat this process on days 5, 6, and 7. I was lucky and my female started eating by day 5, though not much at first. It took my male until day 7 to even test anything and still wouldn't eat well. If you get to day 7 and your fish has not tried anything at all, add another bottle of copepods, but this time use the garlic first. On day 8 go back to just the frozen foods and garlic. Keep trying this cycle, 4 or possibly 5 days of garlic and frozen foods only, then only one bottle of copepods if they haven't eaten anything. This will give them just enough nourishment to stay healthy, but will also make them hungry enough to encourage them to try something new.

As soon as your fish eats one or two bites of frozen food, you have a realy good chance. At this point, no matter where you are in the cycle, stop adding the Tiggerpods all togeather for at least 3 weeks as long as the fish continues to at least nibble at the frozen food. By the end of this three week period your fish should be eating very well. It's my opinion that since copepods are their natural diet, your fish will be healthier if you continue to give copepods at least once or twice a month for it's entire life span. Once you have the fish eating like a little piggy, I would gradually wean them off the garlic since long term use may possibly cause health issues (the jury is still out on weather or not this is certain). Cut the dose of garlic down by one drop every two or three days until they are off of it entirely.

NOTE: I am not an expert, FAR FAR from it. I do not know if this will work for others or if I just got really lucky. There is NO scientific evidence that this procedure is accurate. This is simply what I did to get the two I have eating well. DO NOT just go out and get these fish and assume this will work for you, do your research. This info is provided in hopes of helping others like me who did research, but either not enough or not from the right sources and are now stuck with a fish that won't eat and don't know what to do. Best of luck to you and your fishies. Happy swimming!

 

Congrats on the success. Thank you for writing up your procedure. It was very thorough and should be quite helpful.

 

Thanks for the write up.

 

good write up! I just got my mandarin to eat its first bit of prepared food yesterday. He just started gobbling down the mysis like a champ.

 

Great write up. The only thing I would like to add is to be carefull when choosing tankmates for a Mandarin. They are very slow non aggressive feeders. Mix them with a tank full of fast aggressive feeders and they will never get enough food to survive. This is the main reason it has always been my stance that supplementing there diet is one thing.Relying on it as the fishes only food source is quite another.

 

Thanks for adding this Vinny and you're absolutely right. I had to take my clarkii's back to the LFS because they were too agressive to be in with my mandarins. The poor things never came out and were not getting enough to eat until I did. The clartkii's were really not well suited to a 29 gal biocube anyways, not enough space for them.

 

Congrats Tharsis! I know just how relieved you must be

And thank you to all for the positive feedback, Happy swimming!

 

There is also a pretty good article in the current Coral magazine about dragonets and how the author got his to eat non-live food if anyone is interested.