Breeding Mandarins

L

loungecloud

AC Members
Aug 30, 2004
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I am considering buying a pair of Mandarins with the hope that they might breed.
My tank is 30"x15"x12" and has been established for about a year. It has lots of live rock and some seaweed, and at the moment has no other inhabitants other than a tiny hermit crab.
Is there anything I should know or any advice before purchasing?
 
How is your pod population? Do you have lots of rubble to encourage the pods to reproduce? That's a small tank, and a single mandarin could clean it out in a few weeks. Having a fuge to hatch and raise pods would be a good first step.

Also, you need to have plans for the larval stage of any eggs.
 
I have quite a bit of live rock/rubble - I would guess about 7-10 kilos and it's well matured. There is also a lot of macro algae.
I was considering throwing in a couple of bags of live brine shrimp and trying to culture them in the tank.
Also, I think the mandarins would be the only fish in there and I've heard that you can get them to eat frozen food sometimes.
Any more advice would be gratefully appreciated!!!
 
I don't know- my one wiped out the pod population in a 90 gallon with a 20 gallon refugium. I buy about $20 a month in pods to keep just the one happy.

Don't do it thinking they might eat frozen food. Unless you see them eat it before you buy them you're just asking for slow starvation.
I think you'd need a much larger tank.
Also rotifer cultures for the fry. And a large grow out tank as well.
 
ok, after more reading and research - I've decided to get a bigger tank. what would be the optimum size tank for a pair of madarins?
 
If setup with a 50 gallon fuge, I'd go with at least a 75--a 120 or 150 would be even better. Restrict tank mates to those that will not compete for food or space--a trigger, maybe, or a volitan. While the lion would be big enough to eat a mandarin, they don't--mandarin's have a thick, nasty-tasting slime coat. I had a mandarin in with a trigger and lion for quite some time (unknown disease killed the lion and mandarin) and the big fish never paid any attention to the mandarin. The big fish provide food for the pods, and have no interest in eating them.
 
loungecloud, you're pretty much doing the right thing according to the guys on my site,
but Cearbhaill, you can be breeding brine shrimp basically for nothing, a girl once ran a brine culture for 2 years on her back step. Hatched some brine (you could buy some adult brine) stuck them in a bucket on her back porch in discarded tank water (from water changes) and let the sun do its thing. Rain topped it off, sometimes she topped it off, but otherwise it thrived on neglect, froze over in the winter, and came back to life in the spring.

No heater, no aerator, no nuthin'.
 
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