Copepods / chaeto

so i have pretty much decided on getting a mandarin for my tank...

i have read that they require a stable environment, so essentially an tank that has been running well for a good few months - i will be patient.

regarding the mandarin though, i see that copepods are pretty much their staple diet and some people do feed them brine shrimp eggs (hatched)
The brine shrimp will be easy to get but then i started reading up on copepods and possibly cultivating them - bummer, not that easy to do.

So then i saw somebody mention chaeto in a refugium and i started thinking - seeing as i will be changing the order of the filtration on my tank this weekend, what about creating a refugium in one of the chambers?

am i being daft?

perhaps place some chaeto in the last chamber with the return pump? hopefully they could grow and flourish in there away from any livestock and the pump will suck them through and into the tank itself?

is this a workable scenario? where can i find some chaeto?

 

it takes up to a year for the pod population to get up to sustainable for just for 1 mandarin

 

1st Keep in mind how much cheato your tank can support and how much space you have to create a fuge.

An adult Mandarin will eat a butt load of pods in your tank. A small fuge will not likely be able to support enough pods for a mandarin...

 

Hi Filthy,

Shaunn and Archiecrain are right. You will need a rather large ref to be able to sustain a mandarin on live food.

 

you will also need light source for the chaeto

 

ah man, bad news all round then. guess i will still explore this option and try to create a ref to have them (pods) introduced to the tank to help keep the population up.... i mean there are other fish that feed on them too

what about feeding the mandarin hatched brine shrimp (apart from the pods from the LR or chaeto) ? could that be sufficient to keep him happy and healthy?

i would really love to keep this fish and the difficulty is only making me want it even more - but i will not get one until i know i can provide everything it needs to survive

 

if its small and moves fish will eat it

 

I have had 2 mandarins for over 6 months now and they a fat and healty even though i do not have a refugium. They do not eat frozen food too... i guess as long as you have a decent amount of good live rock it will be ok. You can shine a flashlight on your rocks at night after lights are off to see if u have pods running around. I also feed frozen cyclops twice a week though, so they might be eating that, ive seen them notice it but i havent really seen them eating it.. maybe i wasnt really watching

 

thats great, how old is your tank set up? i have read that the tank needs to be at least a good few months old so i dont want to screw it up

i dont know what these are, also, how do you feed them?

 

My tank is over a year old. You can probably buy cyclops at your Lfs, they come frozen in a block like brine shrimp etc. they look like some tiny creatures that resemble small pods. There is no guarantee that a mandarin will eat them though, as I said I haven't actuslly seen mines eating it, although they might have as I have definitely seen it catch their attention I ususlly just thaw out the cyclops, switch off my return pump and dump it in the tank whenever I feed my coral. My clowns love eating it so does banggai Cardinal and some other smaller fish. It will prob also be beneficial to some filter feeders in your rocks