I ordered some fish about 2 weeks ago and the site I ordered from had a great deal on mandarins (we’ve wanted one for a long time now). I’m assuming it’s wild caught (yes, first mistake we know).
We ordered some copepods at the same time to beef up the tank’s supply. We knew we’d have to train it to eat normal foods and after going through a lot of threads and YouTube videos, nothing is working!
The Setup:
He went into a 40g, old display tank with all original live rock (tank is now our “observation tank”). Hard to say if the tank still had a decent supply of copepods but either way we added some jars from AlgaeBarn.
For the first two weeks we just let him roam free but he didn’t seem interested in any foods we offered. So on YouTube advice we moved him to a large mesh isolation box in order to target feed and observe better last weekend.
Foods Tried (with and without garlic):
Frozen mysis
Bloodworms
Arctipods
Can O’ Cyclops
Live hatched baby brines
Pellets
Flakes
He couldn’t care less about any of these foods. He doesn’t mind the target feeder, but I can put these foods right in front of his face and he’ll just stare at them and eventually swim away. He’s been losing weight over the past 2.5 weeks and today his belly is so sunken! It’s too late this week to order more live copepods and I thought the smaller basket plus bloodworms might hopefully work (the latest recommended food). No luck.
If he survives to next week I can get more copepods and move him back to the rock. But, it doesn’t solve the problem of getting him onto regular foods short or long term even assuming I can keep him alive with copepod orders alone.
Any tips and tricks I’m missing?! I'm worried he's going to starve to death at this point.
He's very cute:
We ordered some copepods at the same time to beef up the tank’s supply. We knew we’d have to train it to eat normal foods and after going through a lot of threads and YouTube videos, nothing is working!
The Setup:
He went into a 40g, old display tank with all original live rock (tank is now our “observation tank”). Hard to say if the tank still had a decent supply of copepods but either way we added some jars from AlgaeBarn.
For the first two weeks we just let him roam free but he didn’t seem interested in any foods we offered. So on YouTube advice we moved him to a large mesh isolation box in order to target feed and observe better last weekend.
Foods Tried (with and without garlic):
Frozen mysis
Bloodworms
Arctipods
Can O’ Cyclops
Live hatched baby brines
Pellets
Flakes
He couldn’t care less about any of these foods. He doesn’t mind the target feeder, but I can put these foods right in front of his face and he’ll just stare at them and eventually swim away. He’s been losing weight over the past 2.5 weeks and today his belly is so sunken! It’s too late this week to order more live copepods and I thought the smaller basket plus bloodworms might hopefully work (the latest recommended food). No luck.
If he survives to next week I can get more copepods and move him back to the rock. But, it doesn’t solve the problem of getting him onto regular foods short or long term even assuming I can keep him alive with copepod orders alone.
Any tips and tricks I’m missing?! I'm worried he's going to starve to death at this point.
He's very cute: