Blue Mandarin, Captive-Bred, Biota

sirvine24

Non-member
This caught my eye while looking to round out my stocking list. http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/5146/blue-mandarin-captive-bred-biota?pcatid=5146&c=747+871+5146

Does anyone have experience with these captive bred Mandarins? They are raised on prepared foods, but I know there's more to it. I had a mandarin before that ate frozen food, but it didn't end well. I'm not looking to make special feeding stations, or to dose pods. So I'm curious if these are more aggressive eaters, and can handle being fed 2-3 times a day in an established aquarium.
 
From what ive heard it's 50/50. If they get a taste for pods than all bets are off. The waiting list is nutzo to..

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I'm pretty sure Aquatic Creations in Amherst, NH has some in stock. He's had them in before and they were eating prepared foods.
 
Not to be a d**k but if you don't want to dose pods or make a feeding station you aren't dedicated enough to own a mandarin. I own a 2 year old male trained to pellets and it's a commitment to keep them healthy and get them trained. I literally just purchased a female Biota Mandarin from Aquatic Creations in Amherst NH to pair with my male on this past Wednesday. She by no means accepts frozen right off and is so small even finding a suitable food beyond live copepods is a challenge it sounds like you don't want to accept. Here's a link to my thread on Nano-Reef that I made to follow her progression in my tank.

https://www.nano-reef.com/forums/to...-journey-begins/?tab=comments#comment-5616703

The amount of effort and money it takes to keep these animals healthy is not an undertaking I would reccomend to someone with your intentions regarding husbandry
 
Yea I would say they are one and the same so far. Essentially it took over a year of actively adding copepods and phyto to keep my male alive, not even healthy, then he finally accepted brine and eventually nutramar ova came back and from there he moved into pellets all the while I still added copepods and had a dedicated pod refugium. Once on pellets and copepods he started gaining weight/growing, but he bottomed out for a while and it was stressful as hell. My Biota female is the size of a quarter and hasn't eaten nutramar ova which is usually like candy to mandarins. I am working on finding a suitable dry/frozen food in her size range now but expect it will be months of adding supplementary copepods from AlgaeBarn. If you are willing to do those steps by all means drive to Amherst and buy one! They are wicked cute and a joy to watch but it's not like buying a clown and throwing in some frozen/flakes/ and pellets. It still needs training IMO and probably copepods/live food additions of some sort indefinitely for good health. In a few months I will know better what it took to succeed assuming I can do so, really hoping monkey see monkey do plays out once she can eat .5mm pellets and take after my male. If you go for it let us know I would love to have another reefer with one to shoot successes and failures off of. Even if my Biota Mandarin does accept frozen soon finding her in my 40 and successfully spot feeding would be a miracle too.
 
I agree with what other posters said. ORA has stopped the production of tank bred mandarin for a while now. The general feed backs were those mandarin would revert to feeding on copepods only after they accessed to them.
But in general, if your tank is matured and large enough, or if you have a refugium, keeping mandarin is not hard.

There was another reason the tank bred mandarin got bad rap was that they look identical to wild ones. Some people were sold wild ones as tank bred.


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Just noticed this thread. We purchased a captive-bred mandarin from LA earlier in the week. It's only been in the tank for two days so way too soon to tell how well it will do. So far it's eaten frozen mysis shrimp every time it's been offered some. We should have a good population of copepods in the tank, I dose phytoplankton daily and I've added several bags of tisbe pods to the tank over the last couple months in preparation for getting a mandarin. And I have a culture of them in a separate tank. I have no idea how well the copepod population is doing in the display tank or smaller tank in the basement though since I can't see them, lol.
 
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