My Spotted Mandarin Fish..

OverThinker · Jun 9, 2009

Is this fish okay to put into a tank with urchins and hermits?

BTW yours looks like a hummingbird when he swims...lol

m_hsiao · Jun 9, 2009

it is fine with urchins and hermits.. there are several ways to keeping one successfully but please do not attempt one unless your tank is really ready for it..
100+ pounds of liverock over 1 year old would most likely provide enough food for the mandarin.. basically a very established aquarium..
2nd way to go about it is culturing your own pods.. a pod farm basically..
or another way is to find a mandarin taht eats prepared foods like mysis and brine shrimp.. at the same time though, only prepared foods would be not sufficient in keeping a mandarin in the long run anyways.. so pods is key.

Abi_Catlow · Jun 10, 2009

asking4trouble said: ↑

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.
Click to expand...

That actually made me cry reading that! i get protective over my fish! nice story but sad ending

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My Spotted Mandarin Fish..

OverThinker Skunk Shrimp

m_hsiao Purple Spiny Lobster

Abi_Catlow Plankton

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My Spotted Mandarin Fish..

OverThinker Skunk Shrimp

m_hsiao Purple Spiny Lobster

Abi_Catlow Plankton

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