What kind of copepods for mandarins?
If you’re able to get ahold of some back issues of Tropical Fish Hobbyist magazine, there are two good articles by a man named Josh Day. He was attempting to keep mandarins in a nano tank by supplementing them with pods and other food sources. One of his mandarins died because it refused to eat the pods, and another went though 3 bottles of them in a days’ time (these sell for about $25-30 per bottle) and was losing weight. What he finally found that worked for him was capelin fish roe, that’s sold in oriental food stores. He was able to keep 4 mandarins using the roe diet, but had to put it into a container with a small opening only the mandarin could fit into to keep the other fish from eating it. He also fed cyclopeze and brine shrimp to vary the diet. I’m posting a link to a website which gives some of the same info as in the article: http://joshday.com/mandarinfish.
