My Spotted Mandarin Fish..

Just wanna show my fish, he's doing really well. I have more pods then he can eat in a day. and my refugium is crawling with it as they reproduce more then my mandarin can eat in a day. .. It is train to eat frozen food as well. I actually caught him eating a mysis shrimp laying on the rock from my clownfish feeding... check it out...! Everyone should own a mandarin.. they sooo cool



YouTube - My Spotted Mandarin Fish

 

Nice dude.... One day I'll have one to show off too

 

He looks fat like mine. Actually he looks like mine
Good Luck

 

Congratulations on keeping a healthy mandarin. He certainly does look strong and well fed. Keep up the good work, I applaud you. I agree that everyone should own a mandarin fish... If they have enough supply of pods and/or it eats frozen food/pellets.

A friend of mine bought me one as a house warming present. The LFS sold it to him with no instruction of any kind besides 'takes a while to adjust to the tank and wont eat for a few days.'
Now my experience of salt is noob status, i bought the tank second hand on ebay. At the time i did not know that this fish was severely underweight, I actually thought the skeletal look was a species trait. The concerning thing is when u research mandarins, many of the pictures you find are of under weight mandarins slowly starving to death and you assume this is how they look naturally. When u see a healthy specimen, with the body plump and a nice meaty hump around the dorsal fin you realise you have been looking at starving specimens as reference.

Anyways, as soon as my friend bought it for me, i researched them as extensively as i could and came to the realisation that this fish was sold already starving and even though i have allot of live rock (and years old actually) the copeopod colony was almost non-existent.

The LFS refused to take it back. The LFS will never get any of my money again (or my friends money in this case i suppose) and I will mentally send him bad karma each time i see or think of a mandarin fish. If the LFS was not so far from my house I would have nailed the dead carcass of this mandarin to his front door (well i wouldnt do that either because putting a nail through a dead fish seems kinda gross - but u know what im getting at here).

I'll tell you why...
Watching a mandarin fish starve to death is excruciating. I tried everything to save it. I posted on local forums for someone to take him, I planned and researched ways to get/grow/breed and or import copeopods (i live in sydney australia btw), I begged the LFS to take him back and put him in the display tank, I rang other LFS's and asked the same. I considered ways to return it to the ocean. I was willing to spend far more than the fish cost to save it even though im on a tight budget. I tried to get it to eat frozen foods by soaking it in fish nutrients, I even bought it cavier FFS.
I honestly tried everything.

I can not tell you how totally crap and upset I felt watching it look for food but finding nothing. Over a week he grew weaker and weaker and I grew more frantic trying to save it. He would look at me through the glass and i would sometimes cry. I'll admit it, I cried.

Eight days after it came from the LFS i woke up to find it dead up against the filter intake. It had become too weak to swim away from it. I took the body out of the tank, put it in a container and it sat on the coffee table for another day while i tried to figure out what to do with it. I'd spent the last week feeling like some kind of crazy marine sea creature home emergency room care and rehabilitation docter - or in other words, i spent shi* loads of time trying to save this fish and now i didnt know what to do with the body.

Eventually I flushed it down the toilet. A wonderful beautiful animal snatched from the ocean, transported in bags, confined in a minuscule bleak sales tank, stressed and starving before dying a probably uncomfortable death infront of his just as uncomfortable new owner before being flushed down the toilet...

This is the dark side of reefing.

 

Wow!!!! I guess we all get pretty attached to our little friends!! You sure gave it a good try, I commend you!!!!

 

We just picked up one last night from the LFS luckily they already had him eating frozen food. Fed him this morning and he is eating and taking a little bit to check out the tank so far so good but I will keep an eye on him for a while

 

Thats great! I sometimes think my mandarin fish picks mysis shrimp over copepods. because whenever I stick in the feeding syringe full of mysis shrimp, he stops at whatever he is looking for and goes straight at the tip waiting for me to sqirt it out. smart lil fellow.. why go searching for pods when theres hassle free food coming! lol..

 

I hope one day I can try my hand at keeping one of these beautiful fish.

 

I hope your gobie is as strong as mine..! I came home from the hospital and fed my Fish .. and outa no where my Maderine came out the rocks and started grubbing on flake food... My heart dropped and was happy as heck that hes eatin flake..!


Lotts Of LUck.!!!

 

flake food? Damn.. you won me there! I applaud. Not even my 2 clownfish eats flakes.. haha.