Liquid feeders

[CrayolaViolence]

Originally Posted by atraperegrinus

you could put a bag of pods in that tank EVERY day, twice a day and it still would not feed one of those fish, much less 2, heres a direct paste from a post made by sk8r, please read it, and heed the advice being given to you here, or in due time both of those fish will die.

i bolded the important part for you. keep in mind, thats for ONE, not two. so your bag of pods is gone in less than an hour and a half using his math. unless you're buying some magic bag of pods that has 4 million in it, 99% of them i see have 1000-2000 pods in them for sale.

good luck and enjoy the hobby, but please for the sake of your animals take them back until your tank is more mature.

edit: falling on deaf ears, good luck. i hope they survive.

I'm not taking them back and they are not going to starve. You could "cook" enough pods in a five gallon bucket to feed an army of mandarins if you know how to grow them. It isn't rocket science. You feed them, you light them, you give them refuge and they breed like flies. My tank is crawling with copods. Just my tank, not to mention my refugium. And all this talk about "you have fish poo" to feed your corals. If I got rid of them I would have no fish poo. I was going to get sea horses at first. Talk about eating A LOT. So my whole set up was first designed to make a lot of copods. My new tank will have a 45 gallon dedicated copod farm with macro algae to feed my tank.

As for the liquid feeder, I found what I needed on ebay. Very cheap, simple, with a valve to do a slow drip in much the same way as running a drip line from the copod factory to the main tank. No batteries, no power, just a valve to give a slow drip putting in the same amount I would daily, over a period of 24 hours.
And I'm sorry but saying that I need to get rid of my mandarin because of how much they eat is as ridiculous as saying get rid of photosynthetic coral because they need plankton and a tank can't support them. (or big dog because of how much it eats…you can't possibly own two Saint Bernard because they eat 50 + plus pounds of food a week). People replenish the plankton by buying it, or you grow it, they don't expect their tanks to make it and people don't go telling them to get rid of their coral because they aren't growing it or they might run out. The man I purchase my stock from has been doing salt water, and only salt water, for over 20 years. He knows his stuff. I follow his directions on growing my copods and I get very good results. And like I said, if I start seeing a drop in numbers, I go buy a few thousand, anywhere from 2-5 depending on how plentiful they look in my tank. I'll probably learn to grow my own plankton next, or is that impossible to (and yes I know people do it already) or do you have to be plankton approved by the plankton police before you're grants permission to do so?

[laga77]

One of the biggest misconceptions about Mandarins is that they only eat pods. When in fact they have a diverse diet in the wild. From Wiki; "Based on the gut analyses of 7 wild fish Sadovy et al. (2001) determined that the mandarinffish has a mixed diet that consists of harpacticoid copepods, polychaete worms, small gastropods, gammaridean amphipods, fish eggs and ostracods. In the wild, feeding is continuous during daytime; the fish peck selectively at small prey trapped on coral substrate in a home range of many square meters." For long term success their diets need to be supplemented. The best way for this in the home is to feed them live BS or live White Worms or Blackworms.