Green Mandarin question

B

blitz224

New Member
Messages
9
Reaction score
0
My son is asking me to add a green mandarin goby to our tank, he has seen them in display tanks at a couple of LFS and loves them. Anyone have experience with them and able to give feedback? I'm wondering if they excavate sand under rockwork, are they picky eaters, aggressive, coral-friendly, etc?

Tank setup is 120gal with sump and skimmer. Livestock is Naso Tang (medium), melanarus wrass (small), 2 clownfish (small), orange anthias (small), 3 green chromis (small), and 2 cleaner shrimp.
 
They are great fish....However.... Most eat only live pods. I would research them before you bite the bullet. Many keep them but your tank needs to be suitable or you need to plan on ordering live pods on a regular basis.
 
I keep one and no they don't excavate at all, they are very active constantly moving around the tank looking for pods. As Rich mentioned you can find them rarely that have been trained to eat prepared foods but the norm is to expect them to live on pods. I seeded my tank when it was young and added the mandy after the tank was about a year old. He does well and takes care of himself. He ignores everyone else in the tank fish and corals included. All he does is move around looking for pods.
 
IMO/IME they're a great little fish... PROVIDED you can find one that will take prepared foods AND are willing to supplement their diet with a periodic dose of bottled copepods (you may even need to with the population already present in your 120, but some macroaglae in your sump should allow for a decent breeding place to keep their population viable). Or look around on this site and do a couple google searches- the DIY brine feeder (paulb's) seems to be a pretty effective way to keep up with their feeding needs, especially in a larger tank where you can't always count on food sticking around to be found. Bonus in that it can encourage the fish to be in a visible location, especially if you camouflage the outside of the feeder with live rock rubble an put it where you can easily watch the fish.

Several sponsors get in more than one or two at a time... you'd be well served to have them feed a bit of some common food (ideally one you already feed) and pick one of the ones that actively goes for it. Training a mandarin onto frozen is indeed possible, but a good bit of work (I have one that I've only partially succeeded with - she'll go for Nutramar, which is in shorter supply nowadays than the aforementioned bottled copepods :roll: ).

You'll need to broadcast feed and have the pumps off for a little while to allow the food to sink onto rockwork - mandarins forage by hunting & pecking versus snagging stuff out of the water column as a general rule.
 
imo. if you can "train" the fish to eat served food that is great. however even ones trained, id consider them to only eat live pods. the melenarus wrasse will compete with the mandarin for food.
you may very well be able to keep the fish provided you dose monthly for pods. skimmers suck up a ton of phyto in the water column so macro algae will be the only thing they can munch on. (short of skimmate or diatoms)

my very best advice i can give you is to look at it's rib cage behind its flipper fins. If the rib cage is sunken in... you have a copepod shortage and need to supplement. if the rib cage looks "fat and rounded" you have a healthy mandarin.

i had a 220 with an 80 gallon fuge and macro as well as miracle mud and had to supplement periodically. just keep an eye on that rib cage as an indicator or he will waste away.

good luck
 
Thanks everyone for the great advice and for sharing your experience, I really appreciate it. Undecided at this point - I'm going to research further and check into the brine feeder setup as well.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
brine has the nutritional equivalence to popcorn (without supplements) and i believe is free swimming as a filter feeder.

copepods are really what he will be pecking at.
 
Russ-IV - great point about assessing a mandarin's health vs. copepod population. They really can starve to death with once a day feedings alone.

Blitz224 - use Russ' suggestion to also pick out your mandarin along with my "does it eat at the store" and you should be golden. Just be prepared to have wasted a trip if none of them look good, or accept a food that you're prepared to feed. Yes, there's plenty of stories of rehabing a not-to-far-gone specimen but take it from me... it can be a LOT of work. (and although I've been lucky in my one try, can supposedly end in failure even if you do all the right things on your part).

BBS is a weird food - freshly hatched & fed to your fish & corals within 12-18 hours they're pretty nutritious - I use them to fatten up my own mandarin if I ever see her lateral line start to show and won't be able to get to a store for a few days. However, once the yolk sack's been consumed by the larval shrimp (by around the 24 hour mark) it's pretty much as you say - popcorn.

Unless you then go to the hassle of gut-loading the brine shrimp with something that is. But then you're looking at 24-48 hours from "hey, I need food for this picky fish" to having some to feed it. ;)
 
Thanks for the great feedback and questions everyone.

There's a good amount of swimming space in the tank, I have 80+ lbs of rock and 25+ of that is in the sump (sump is oversized to allow for lots of rock and a refugium setup). Total water volume in the system is around 95 gallons. Tank is about 5 months old, we started with a pretty thick live sand bed as well (60lbs of CaribSea sand).

There's a visible population of pods in the sump and around the chaeto in there, but I don't see them much up in the tank, so either they are getting eaten by the fish or haven't made it up into the tank yet?
 
if there are any. your mandarin will see them and peck at the rocks every 3-5 seconds. then comb over another section. if he is just moving from place to place you have a pod shortage
 
https://vid.me/12nO">https://vid.me/12nO</a>

blitz you want your mandarin feeding like this. not vroom vrooming around.
this is a well fed mandarin i rescued from a local petco.

in 48 hours he went from a somalian to a fat ***
 
Blitz224;1039481 wrote: Thanks for the great feedback and questions everyone.

There's a good amount of swimming space in the tank, I have 80+ lbs of rock and 25+ of that is in the sump (sump is oversized to allow for lots of rock and a refugium setup). Total water volume in the system is around 95 gallons. Tank is about 5 months old, we started with a pretty thick live sand bed as well (60lbs of CaribSea sand).

There's a visible population of pods in the sump and around the chaeto in there, but I don't see them much up in the tank, so either they are getting eaten by the fish or haven't made it up into the tank yet?
Click to expand...

If you have both live rock chaeto in the sump, the pods have more than enough places to breed without fear of being eaten by anything. If you are really concerned, buy a bottle of pods when you get the fish and pour it (the bottle of pods) into your sump where you keep the rock and chaeto. As they overpopulate that area, they will get sucked up into your display. Pods are pretty difficult to see in a display tank unless you let algae grow on the glass, in which case, you can see them easily.
 
What all was said above was good advice.

Keep in mind the wrasse will compete for the tiny crustaceans the Mandarin Dragonet eats. (Pet peeve of mine, the 'industry' calls these fishes gobies or blennies, but they are neither - they are dragonets).

Great fish, very entertaining, and if the dietary needs are met, they are relatively easy to keep, as they are very disease resistant. Biggest cause of death is starvation, followed by jumping.

If you can keep it fat and contained, a dragonet will give you years of entertainment.

Jenn
 
JennM;1039991 wrote:
If you can keep it fat and contained, a dragonet will give you years of entertainment.

Jenn
Click to expand...

Are you talking about me or the fish???? :)
 
Here is what has worked for me.

Find one that is still pecking and actively look for food.

Put your new mandarin into a small QT tank or breeder box. They don't need a lot of swimming room. I use a 12" x 5" box.

All mandarins in the stores have been starving for weeks, so make sure you have some BBS on hand. It's crucial that you get them to eat something as soon as possible, and most mandarins will gorge on BBS.

Day two, start mixing frozen brine shrimp with the live BBS. The mandarin will accidentally eat a couple of adults but spit them out. Don't let that discourage you. Keep presenting the adult BS in front of them. Continue doing this for the next two or three days. The key is to have so many BS in the breeder box that they mandarin will literally eat some just by inhaling water. Eventually, they will stop spitting the adult brine shrimp out.

Mandarins also love blood worms and black worms. It's not good for them, but it will fatten up the emancipated ones quickly. If you can get them to eat one or two blood worms the first couple of days, the chances of them surviving increases greatly.

Last tip, choose the biggest mandarin you can find. The bigger they are the more likely they will accept larger frozen foods. Small ones will not eat adult brine shrimp as readily. The larger ones can eat feeder shrimps without a problem.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

jordanbevis
Killer RBTA??
Replies
15
Views
669
jordanbevis
jordanbevis
shac
Weekly Fish/Invert List at Reef Shac
Replies
0
Views
544
shac
shac
shac
Fish/Inverts 9/22/22 Update!
Replies
0
Views
539
shac
shac
shac
Fish/Invert Update 7/20/22
Replies
0
Views
332
shac
shac
Mackey
Aquarium Murder mystery
2 3
Replies
43
Views
2K
Mackey
Mackey
Back
Top