H20COOL Posted June 23, 2012 Share Posted June 23, 2012 howdy.. back way back when i was a college student at UT back in early 90s (yes, i'm old lol). I had this awesome little hexagon tank with a local guy who built a custom overflow filter in back and i supplemented with canister ehiem and just flouro's for light.. this is mind you 20 years ago.. i had that tank rocking with all types of cool coral, need critters that came on live rock, etc.. with only a single clownfish and a mandarin goby. back then nobody had refugiums, nobody said anything about copepods, blah blah. eventually i got to where i didn't even change the water it was so stabilized, when i did change water bad things happened so i literally left it alone and it flourished.. and my mandarin lived years.. so now i had mentioned to someone about them, and was told "oh no, you have to have copepods to feed them, have to grow in refugium, blah blah". well.. i certainly didn't back then and the technology i have now is 100000x more advanced. i know it was just a mature tank and copepods probably hitchhiked on LR and grew on their own.. so here's the deal - my new tank (about 4+ months old, but wasn't entirely brand new as i had some else's water and substrate with all kinds of bio in it) is doing well, just have a few fish - and i want a mandarin. And at night, i see TONS of those copepods all over my tank, climbing over rocks, in the sand, etc.. .so it appears i have them. is that good enough to get one? i mean i shine a light i see what looks like little insects crawling all over my rock at night thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
H20COOL Posted June 23, 2012 Author Share Posted June 23, 2012 oh to clarify - i have a lot of coral- some SPS, some LPS, zoas, acro, etc.. inverts, and eel, and everyone is happy. Just clarifying its not just "a few fish" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherita Posted June 23, 2012 Share Posted June 23, 2012 How big is your tank, and what other fish do you have that eat pods? The question you need to figure out is do you have enough pods to sustain a population once they are being eaten, and personally I think that has a lot to do with how big your tank is. I have mandys in two of my tanks, but I run fuges on all of my tanks so that probably is not helpful in the least for you I have also had excellent luck getting my mandys to eat frozen, starting out with enriched brine and working up to small mysis and also bloodworms. You could hunt out an ORA Mandarin, they already eat frozen, then you wouldn't need to worry about it. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AquaJohn Posted June 23, 2012 Share Posted June 23, 2012 If you have the carpet of bugs you say you do i am sure it would be fat and happy altho fat may make the eel happy lol. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
subsea Posted June 23, 2012 Share Posted June 23, 2012 You are good to go if no one else needs the live food. Sherita sumed it up with "can the amphipods and copepods sustain themselves while being harvested by the mandarin". Most people rush the process before the bottom of the food chain matures. That is the point of the refugium. No predators with an abundance of herbivores. I am also "old school" and have a 5 month startup cycle on 135G lagoon tank. Less technology with more biology is my motto. Patrick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sascha D. Posted June 23, 2012 Share Posted June 23, 2012 I have a similar situation that happened to me in 2002. I had a 180 with tons of pods and no refugium. I introduced a mandarin at around the 6 month mark, but had two other fish that ate pods; six line wrasse and a sunrise dottyback. The mandarin was pretty skinny when I put him in there and he quickly put on weight and got pretty fat. At around the 12 month mark I noticed that there were a lot less pods around at night and my mandarin was losing weight. I think the pods were having trouble maintaining their numbers despite having a big tank with 200 lbs of LR because they didn't have a place to breed where the fish couldn't reach them. I ended up putting in a 60g refug and dense rock piles for the pods, but never again saw those pod carpets. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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