Mandarin and pods

Ive wanted to keep the delicate Mandarin goby for some time. I have a 10 gallon fuge on my 125 that holds live rock and cheato only. What should I do to keep a Mandarin happy and healthy?

 

Do you have a lot of live rock in the DT? If so then you should be able to keep one specially if there are no other fish that feed on pods.

 

I thought all fish feed on pods with the exception of fish like tangs etc.

 

Depends on the setup and what you have in your tank but a mature tank with lots of live rock and a huge fuge are ideal. If you have a lot of live rock and a lot of pods you are probably ok. Keep an eye on the mandarin to make sure it stays plump. If it starts looking thin then you'll need to get him fattened up. You could try training it to eat other foods than pods. It can be done but I've never done it myself so aren't very familiar with it. Some like bloodworms is the best I can offer there.

You might consider getting one of the ORA tank bred ones. They are supposed to be eating other foods already. Jury is still out on that though. I know a couple of people who got them and it wasn't clear yet whether they were eating prepared foods in my friends tanks.

 

The thing is that mandarins or dragonetts feed almost always exclusively on pods. That's why they're an advanced fish and only well established tanks can host them.
You could also buy and seed live pods for feeding purposes, if you don't have them in the tank. Just add them at night to give them a chance to hide and reproduce later. You may need to replenish the population after a couple of months to renew the available food for the mandarin.

Sometimes, you can get mandarins to eat frozen/prepared foods, but this doesn't always happen. In fact, you will be considered one of the lucky people whose mandarin eats forzen or prepared food

 

they all basically do, assuming the fish aren't too large to go after them effectively.

However some are extremely predatory of pods like wrasses, probably hawkfish too.

 

Where could I get some pods from?

 

they will grow from the live rock. You shouldn't need to buy any. There are places that sell them but they are not inexpensive. If you need to buy them check the sponsor list for 3reef. There may be one or two places there that sell them. You may also be able to get them from an LFS if they use refugiums growing macro algae as part of their filtration

 

the store, some sell them in a bottle. It will be unreasonable to try to feed the fish from bottled pods due to price.

Really there's probably some in your fuge anyway. Its just a question of whether the mandarin will find enough in you DT, its alllllooootttt slower then a wrasse.

 

If your tank has been set up for a while you already have them even if you never see them. The question is whether there are enough to feed a mandarin in the long run. Too many people get them when their tanks can't support them and they slowly starve.

Keep in mind that if you have a mandarin and you get something like redbugs or flatworms, the treatment for those may hurt or kill of the pod population in your tank so you need to take special precautions to make sure the mandarin continues to get enough to eat until the pod population reestablishes itself.