I'm becoming a pod farmer! Well kinda...

Yep. I'm becoming a pod farmer. With the end result of us having a nice food supply for a mandarin.

Ever since the death of our 6 line wrasse (the only fish we had that ate pods), we've wanted to try a mandarin. With a tank that's over 1.6 years old, and my mom and I researching and being involved in this hobby for 2 years, I'm pretty sure we can handle it. The thing is, our tank is only a 46 gallon with about 65-70lbs of total rock in it.

Well, I fully agree with most tanks needing to be old and large to support a mandarin. I am also very against mandarins eating frozen or prepared food instead of pods. Well, my tank is old, but about half the size a mandarin needs. So i'm going to farm me up some pods for it

Packleader did a method similar to this and supported his mandarin in a 40 breeder for well over a year (Before the poor mandarin jumped ), and if you ever saw Pack's mandarin, that little guy was FAT. And all he ate was pods. So I'm feeling that success is quite probable.

What I did was to turn our empty 10gallon tank into a pod farm. There's about 5 gallons of water in it (all from our 46gallon), some rocks, as well as multiple course sponges and a clump of chaeto. The water is between 79 and 80 degrees with an air stone for air and flow. We bought a jar of DT's pods and poured half into our 46 at night, and the other half into the 10 gallon pod farm to seed both tanks. We may get our LFS to order us some more if we want to. But we're going to wait a few weeks, get the pods growing like nuts, and then probably grab us a mandarin

Pics of the setup will come sometime this week. I would say some time today, but I forget things

Also, Bo our mantis shrimp has a crap ton of pods in his tank, so I'm using a little sponge and some squid to trap some pods and shake them out into the 10. Bo definitely doesn't need them that's for sure, he just needs to stay away from my squid

 

Sounds good! I have a similar set-up for farming pods. One thing I noticed was that, at least in my experience, the pods grow better without the airstone in that volume of water. In my tank they like to swim at the top of the water and eat whatever thin scum layer exists there, and the bubbles disturb that. Just something to consider. Good luck with the pod farm!

 

Oh ok sounds good! Thanks for that tid bit. I guess since they're inverts and teeny tiny they don't need to really have excess air being pumped in. I'll stir the water every now and then if I have to I suppose.

I forgot to mention that I'm dosing phyto in about once a week (might switch to twice once the pods start exploding everywhere) and water changes will be about 2 gallon water changes using water from the main reef tank as the change water.

 

Cool sounds good. Keep us updated.

 

good idea. how many pods do you think one really needs to support a mandarin? are we talking 100's or 1000's in the display? id say at the moment i have a couple hundred in my fuge.

i intend to get a mandarin as soon as i feel im comfortable keeping one, so this might prove to be an excellent idea for the 10gal tank i have sitting collecting dust.

do you do water changes on that routinely to keep the params in check? i presume you have 0 filtration on it, and you were just intending to use an airstone? also as far as the airstone breaking the top layer too much, put a valve and turn the air out put down with a tiny stone in the corner shouldnt affect most of the surface too bad.

 

Can't wait to hear about your progress on this project! How do you plan on getting pods from tank A to tank B?

 

Nicely said! +1 My pods like the top of the water in the chateo also. Mine seem to like very little if any flow also, even though most say chateo grows better when it's tumbled. I have barely any flow through my fuge at all.

 

same, i have 10% of the water draining from my display into the fuge and the rest into the sump. my chaeto doesnt tumble, i manually tumble it bi-weekly. the pods infestation within the chaeto is ridiculous they run up my arms and such when i touch that chaeto. soon im gonna have to start using long tongs or something thing to move it around or they'll eat my arm off in vast numbers.

the sponge method works best for moving pods from the fuge to the display. i had actually posted about this in another thread this week. i asked what the best way to do it was and the sponge method works great. picking up a clump of chaeto full of pods and shaking it into the display only caused a mess.

 

I also use the sponge method. Nobody wants a bunch of pieces of chateo floating around in the DT!

 

i didnt realize how brittle chaeto was till i tried doing that.... EPIC FAIL. week later im still picking little bits of chaeto out of the powerheads.