So I bought a mandarin...

[Midnight]

Hey, Phreek. Let's end this nonsense. If you say you were trying to help, then I take you at your word. Thanks. I overreacted, and I'm sorry. I'm man enough to admit when I'm wrong.

I just want to do what's best for the mandarin. Like I said, I got him because I felt I was ready, not because he "looked cool and I just had to have him." I know they're difficult to maintain.

Here are my specs:
55-gallon with about 20 gallon sump
Been up for 4 months
0 ammonia
0 nitrite
0-3 nitrate
440 calcium
8.4 pH
11 dKh
Phosphates undetectable
60 lbs. live sand
Over 100 lbs. live rock

One mandarin goby
One powder brown tang
One lawnmower blenny
One striped damsel
One coral banded shrimp
One flame scallop
One sand-sifting starfish
Various snails
Buttloads or pods and bristle worms
Star polyps and a hitchhiker button polyp
Coralline algae taking off

Algal turf scrubber and a HOB canister with carbon
No pads, sponges or screens to catch pods

Let's try this again with the proper info. and some civility on my part.

I like your stock list its a lot like what I started out with. I would to be on the safe side buy pods once a month or so and add them to your sump to help keep enough of them in there since your tank is only 4 months old. Not to get to far of topic but be careful with the Powder brown tang they are ich magnets and need a lot of room and a 55 is really pushing it. Other than that good luck with the mandarin

 

[jski711]

I'll post it anyways. here i had a thread with this posted in it.

You need to start with the fish in a breeder net so it is isolated
It is much easier to feed your fish this way and is imperative for the training process. first you need to get the fish eating enriched live brine shrimp. brine shrimp alone have little nutritional value so you need to gut load them with some selcon or phyto a couple hours before feeding. once they are eating the live brine then start adding some frozen brine in the mix. you also have to make sure that there is some sort of flow though the net so the frozen brine looks alive from the flow through the net. after it is eating only frozen brine then you start mixing in some mysis shrimp. Keep in mind this could take a week or a few months of training depending on the fish. i have done this before and it has only taken a couple of weeks. It is very important to get them onto the mysis because they are much more nutritious than the brine shrimp. after they are on the mysis i would still keep them in the net for a few weeks and get them nice and fat. after that i have noticed they will basically eat any frozen foods. i have had trouble getting them on pellets but have heard of some people having success with some of the smaller pellets. You may have to "retrain" them if they are getting skinny again and also depending on the fish you have in the same tank you may have to employ another method of feeding. get a small jar and put the food in there, as long as no other fish can get in, they should find the food. Dragonettes are very methodical feeders and do not do well with competition. Hopefully this helps many people and if you have any questions please shoot me a pm and i will be glad to answer them. I would like to see this as a sticky but thats not up too me. thank you for reading and Good Luck on feeding these beautiful fish.

Jake

 

[Tuscaquatics]

Hey don't take this the wrong way but how are you running an turf scrubber without a screen? what does the algae grow on? Also if you want some more info on "training" your mandarin please LMK.

Good question. I guess I shouldn't have so 'no SCREENS' because obviously the turf is growing on a screen and I have to rinse the pods off once in a while. I meant no sponges or prefilters. That kind of thing. And I was running a canister with floss but I took that off after the scrubber got going.

 

[jski711]

gotcha. i was running one for a while and loved it. it was too small for my tank though, the next tank i setup i will make sure i have enough room for a nice big scrubber.

 

[Phreek]

it looks like a Sand Sifting Star to me. So I wouldn't worry about him eating the pod population so much. Just keep in mind these guys need alot of food as well, and can make short work of the detritus and other things in the tank. Once there is no more food, it will bury itself in the sand and die...beginning to decay. So make sure it constantly has some food source so you can avoid this. There's nothing more satisfying that keeping a creature healthy and happy in your aquarium.

 

[Tuscaquatics]

Saltwater Aquarium Starfish for Marine Reef Aquariums: Sand Sifting Sea Star

This should be the same thing

Yeah, that's what I have. He actually loves shrimp pellets that I usually give to my dojo loach in one of my FW tanks. I pepper a few of them on the sand every few days and, oftentimes, he immediately comes up from under the sand and moves right on top of the pellets. Yum!

 

[Tuscaquatics]

gotcha. i was running one for a while and loved it. it was too small for my tank though, the next tank i setup i will make sure i have enough room for a nice big scrubber.

Yeah, it's been awesome so far. Within a couple weeks my nitrates plummeted until they bottlenecked at about 10-15. Then I took off the canister and they went away for good. I had some chaeto and caulerpa in the display for the tang to nibble on. He's eaten off most of the branches and now they won't even grow back, which I take as a good sign.

Aside from that, I have zero algae in the display, except for coralline. Luckily my blenny loves flake food and nori, too. I've chilled out on the snails as well. I have 3 turbins, 1 regular turbo, 3 zebra turbos and 3 other tiny ones that I can't figure out the name of. They're kind of long and black and maybe the size of a... lets say a toenail clipping, for lack of a better analogy.

 

[fivel]

I agree with the others regarding the sandsifting star not competing with the mandarin for pods. Mine has spent his last 3 years in my tank burying himself from one spot to the next, plus he has 6 legs instead of 5 *grin*

 

[Tuscaquatics]

I agree with the others regarding the sandsifting star not competing with the mandarin for pods. Mine has spent his last 3 years in my tank burying himself from one spot to the next, plus he has 6 legs instead of 5 *grin*

Now that is cool. How do you think he ended up with 6 legs? Mutation of some sort? Do you live near a nuclear plant? LOL.

I've been trying to find one of these...

 

[fivel]

I have no idea... but one day I was at Pet Supplies Plus and saw him in their Coral tank where nothing is actually supposed to be for sale. The manager of that store is one of my best friends and I talked her into selling him to me since he would ever rarely be seen in a tank with such little exposed sand. Needless to say I couldn't be happier with my little mutant, lol

I do live in Ohio though about 50 miles from the Davis Bessy Nuclear Plant... so I could probably find you a blinky fish in Lake Erie although he won't be saltwater

 

[Tuscaquatics]

I have no idea... but one day I was at Pet Supplies Plus and saw him in their Coral tank where nothing is actually supposed to be for sale. The manager of that store is one of my best friends and I talked her into selling him to me since he would ever rarely be seen in a tank with such little exposed sand. Needless to say I couldn't be happier with my little mutant, lol

I do live in Ohio though about 50 miles from the Davis Bessy Nuclear Plant... so I could probably find you a blinky fish in Lake Erie although he won't be saltwater

You guys have Pet Supplies Plus up there, too? I'm in Alabama and it's basically the only LFS in town. Except for another place that I won't go to anymore since the guy takes almost zero care of his tanks. He had a puffer in there for a few weeks that I loved but I couldn't get since I'm going for a reef tank. I went in there a couple weeks ago to see what was up and the puffer was laying in the corner, dead, eyes glazed over. He wouldn't even take it out.

A nicely-dressed middle-aged couple came in to look at some fish and said, "Oh honey, look at the cute fish laying in the corner! He must be sleeping or something." The owner heard it and didn't say anything. That's when I decided not to go back.

That and I bought a golfball-sized turbo snail from him and put him in my tank and he died in a few hours. I brought him back and asked him to replace him and he said he would, "this time." But he doesn't give guarantees since people's water quality can be anything. So he replaced it and I put him in and same thing: dead in a few hours - arguably never even made it home. I figured it was because I was taking it out of his pisswater and putting into my clean tank. And I'm the one with the poor water quality, yeah right.

PSP isn't bad, but the people that work in there are morons. When I got the mandarin there, I asked the guy how much they wanted for him. He said 24.99. I told him that the day before someone else quoted me 15 dollars. He said he'd do me a favor and give it to me for 15 since someone else told me that. When he went into the tank to net him, he grabbed a butterfly fish that was in there. I said that's not a mandarin. He went back and looked at the price again and said, oh yeah, he's 15. He goes, "I should have looked under mandarin GOBY, that was the problem." Moe-ron.

 

[lcstorc]

I've gotten lost on this thread so I'll just throw in a few things that stuck in my mind.
Thanks everybody for all of the compliments. We are all learning around here and I just try to share my experience which has often been learned the hard way.
It is not "that easy" to get banned here. As long as everybody plays nice we will all be fine.
I didn't ask the age of the tank since it had already been mentioned that it was 3 months old so I knew it was a young tank.
No matter how good they are, do not use the LFS as your only source of information. In fact, don't rely on any one source. Do thorough research. Do keep in mind that the LFS makes their money by selling you things. Many will sell you a fish not suited for your tank either because they don't know any better or because they want to make money now and when you buy a fish to replace it.
This may have nothing to do with the snail problem, but inverts are very sensitive to changes in pressure and therefore require a longer acclimation than most livestock. Many people are unaware of this and don't acclimate them or do a fast acclimation. I'm certainly not saying you did, but it's worth mentioning in general.
I hope that made some sense.
Good luck with the mandarin. They are gorgeous fish and fortunately some are having success with captive breeding of these animals which is even more wonderful. (D3monic is one of them I believe.)

 

[Tuscaquatics]

I've gotten lost on this thread so I'll just throw in a few things that stuck in my mind.
Thanks everybody for all of the compliments. We are all learning around here and I just try to share my experience which has often been learned the hard way.
It is not "that easy" to get banned here. As long as everybody plays nice we will all be fine.
I didn't ask the age of the tank since it had already been mentioned that it was 3 months old so I knew it was a young tank.
No matter how good they are, do not use the LFS as your only source of information. In fact, don't rely on any one source. Do thorough research. Do keep in mind that the LFS makes their money by selling you things. Many will sell you a fish not suited for your tank either because they don't know any better or because they want to make money now and when you buy a fish to replace it.
This may have nothing to do with the snail problem, but inverts are very sensitive to changes in pressure and therefore require a longer acclimation than most livestock. Many people are unaware of this and don't acclimate them or do a fast acclimation. I'm certainly not saying you did, but it's worth mentioning in general.
I hope that made some sense.
Good luck with the mandarin. They are gorgeous fish and fortunately some are having success with captive breeding of these animals which is even more wonderful. (D3monic is one of them I believe.)

Thanks. Yeah, I knew that about invert acclimation. I did the drip for a couple hours with them, especially the second time around. I'm petty sure it's his water.

 

[TylerHaworth]

If it's alive while it's in his tanks, the animal has definitely adapted and acclimated safely and arguably happily to his "dirty" water...

It's not his water or your water, it's something traumatic occurring in the harvest, transport, and/or reintroduction process between his tank and yours, especially since the death is very close to immediate upon transfer, or even before acclimation has begun as you mentioned...

This is me just thinking out loud.

 

[Tuscaquatics]

If it's alive while it's in his tanks, the animal has definitely adapted and acclimated safely and arguably happily to his "dirty" water...

It's not his water or your water, it's something traumatic occurring in the harvest, transport, and/or reintroduction process between his tank and yours, especially since the death is very close to immediate upon transfer, or even before acclimation has begun as you mentioned...

This is me just thinking out loud.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. It was doing fine in his tank, which was dirty and the snail was used to it. The complete 180 in water quality was probably too much for them.

Every other snail I got from the other store has done great since I put them in. Not to mention the other fish and coral. I put some star polyps in last week and they opened back up within about an hour of introducing them. And I have another polyp that just popped out on his own a couple of months after I put in the live rock. So my water quality must be pretty good.

 

[Paul B]

And from what I've read, they're basically impossible to keep alive in the home.

I disagree with this and as I said, I find them the easiest, least maintenance fish there is, "If" you have a large enough, old enough, well fed enough tank.
You don't have to feed them, they are very disease tolerant, and other fish don't pick on them much. They also spawn readily.
Have a great day.
Paul

 

[lcstorc]

Also they apparently have a bad tasting slime coat. One of our members a while ago got a great pic of his mandarin in the mouth of one of his fish (I believe a tang) and it didn't like the taste at all. It immediately let him go. It was a really freaky but cool pic.

 

[BobBursek]

Manderins do not have scales so they rely on a very heavy slime coat to protect them from parasites and other things. I do not know if it is toxic to some degree to other creatures.

 

[fivel]

I remember like 6+ years ago I read somewhere that mandarins "skin" was actually toxic to fish that would nip or eat it. I have no idea where I saw that since it was so long ago but kind of falls into what everyone else is saying.

 

[Paul B]

Also they apparently have a bad tasting slime coat. One of our members a while ago got a great pic of his mandarin in the mouth of one of his fish (I believe a tang) and it didn't like the taste at all. It immediately let him go. It was a really freaky but cool pic.

I also found this out. I once put a tiny mandarin in my reef and the Bangai cardinal immediately ate him. He spit him out almost immediately.

Most animals that are garish colors are poisonous like poisonous snakes, poison frogs, nudibranchs, and some sea apples. Apparently mandarins also.
Anybody want to eat one as an experiment?