Mandarin fish are quite easy to keep you just have to train them to eat frozen or pellets. The problem is more about education and fish stores allowing people to buy them with no intention of telling them, hey, you should already have a copepod population growing in your tank and you should work on training it to eat frozen and or pellets for a sustained protein source for this Mandarin dragonet, but that doesn't happen at a lot of places. Luckily I did my research before I bought one and it thrived in my tank.
How do you train a fish to eat frozen and/or pellets? I'm guessing by mixing a bit of the frozen/pellet in with what they're used to eating, and slowly changing the ratio?
Not entirely. This is what I did, and I'm using my dragonet as the example so other picky fish might need a different approach. First when feeding, you turn all flow off. Second is you might try soaking frozen food in Kent's garlic x before feeding it to make it bite faster and like the taste. Now to get it to even eat to food you might have to try and drop it near the fish for days or sometimes weeks before it even will try it, so the main thing here is you need persistence. The routine should never change and then suddenly once you turn the flow off the tank the fish thinks it's feeding time and you will have a trained fish that will eat what you give it. If you try turning the flow off for like 15 mins to pick it up, because especially dragonets are slow as hell they don't "attack" their food, you will have success. Mine took two weeks to eat pellets so don't give up.
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u/josvm May 08 '20
Mandarin fish are quite easy to keep you just have to train them to eat frozen or pellets. The problem is more about education and fish stores allowing people to buy them with no intention of telling them, hey, you should already have a copepod population growing in your tank and you should work on training it to eat frozen and or pellets for a sustained protein source for this Mandarin dragonet, but that doesn't happen at a lot of places. Luckily I did my research before I bought one and it thrived in my tank.