Hi everyone, we have an already stablished salt water tank with several fish in it (Clowns, Tangs, Damsels, etc.), and my Mandarin is looking a little bit scrawny, how do I get to feed him more copepods? (It's what makes the bulk of their diet.) Please, can anybody help me?, thanks.
Answers:
Most marine stores sell live pods, arrange to buy some weekly. I have a fish-only tank and I turn off the filters for twenty minutes a day to allow the brine shrimp to settle over the live rock. It took a few days but the dragonet did learn to eat them and has been doing very well since then (it also gives the pods a chance to easily grab a bit to eat and they breed faster).
A
LOOK IT UP!! Hello, internet!
You can purchase live copepods online (such as https://www.reed-mariculture.com/copepod. or http://www.oceanpods.com or alternate sites) or maybe at the local fish store if they have them.
You may want to set up a refugium or smaller tank full of macroalgae and culture them. You could try feeding your mandarin bloodworms and see if it'll eat that in the meantime.
the best way it to get a refugium . pods at store and on line usually arrive dead and are totally useless. look on line for ways to make refugium . its are to tell you how without details about your tank design. you really should research mandarins, they very hard fish to take care of. definitely not for beginners
I have found the best way to do that is to build a refugium. Use a ten gallon tank and get lights for it. If you have a hood with the screw in lights, coralife makes retrofit pcs that screw in and they do a great job on a ten gallon tank. Then go to your lfs and see if you can buy a bunch of crums and muddy material out of the bottom of their live rock vats and this will make a good substrate and get you started. It is pretty much the same as live sand. Then get some cheap base live rock and a bunch of macro algae and the copepods will take off.
Now to get the steady supply, you will want to plumb this into your tank. Probably the best way to do this would be to siphon the water out of the tank and into your refugium where it will be filtered by the algae. From ther, i would siphon it again into your sump where it will be pumped back into your tank. By having your refugium separate from the animals, you will be able to keep a constant supply of food that they will not be able to completely deplete.
A couple last things on the refugium: Its not pretty. It needs SLOW water flow to get any benefit from it. Make sure that you give it light. Treat it as another tank that has its own needs. You wont have to do a whole lot with it, but make sure that it gets at least an 8 hour photoperiod.
Hope this helps.
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