Does anyone sell or ship this in canada?

[bluesox68]

Tisbe biminiensis - found them in the US.. but where can i get this here??
I really want to get a manderan in the future and I think I have an ok pod population from my 20g refuge to my 40 dt but I want to be safe. I had to dose flat worm exit 4 months ago and I'm not sure if that directly harms pods or the toxins from the dead flat worms kills pods I just don't see as many as I use too since fwe, does that make sense? Thanks!

[Myka]

Tigger Pods from Reed Mariculture are perfectly good to use for Mandarin food, and are more easily available than Tisbe copepods. Check your LFS for Tiggers (they will be in a fridge).

A 40-gallon tank is likely to be too small to sustain a Mandarin that does not eat prepared foods. I would suggest you set up a smaller tank, like a 10 or 20-gallon with some mature live rock, add some pods, and add a feeding station. A feeding station will be a small glass jar or dish. Everyday add 2-3 frozen brine shrimp to the feeding station, and siphon it out at the end of the day if he doesn't eat it. At first, he won't eat the food at all. Once a week you can add 1/2 bottle of Tigger Pods to the tank too. I've been able to train several Mandarins this way in 2-3 weeks. Make sure you start off with a big, fat Mandarin that recently arrived at the LFS. The longer they go without food the less likely they are to start feeding, so get them fresh!

After they are eating brine shrimp well you can start mixing in small frozen mysis shrimp to their dish. Once they are eating both, remove the dish, and squirt (with turkey baster) food near the sand where the dish was. Then start moving the food around to different places so the Mandarin has to hunt. After several weeks in this tank the Mandarin should once again be nice and fat and eating readily when he will be ready to go into the display tank. He will know to hunt for the food, and you can squirt it in a corner that he likes where the other fish won't bother him much.

Many other fish will compete for food with the Mandarin as well. A Mandarin will do best in a tank with docile fish that won't quickly snap up all the food before the slow eating Mandarin can.

[BlueWorldAquatic]

we carry it in stock, with all the other live foods also

[bluesox68]

Awesome, I will check that out and great tips. I do have a 10 gallon set up for just pods and cheato so I can have a ton of pods. I planned to put half the bottle in the 10g and half in the refuge. I will wait for a now fat arrival like ou said too!

[daniella3d]

Tiger pods don't settle in our aquariums and quickly die or are eaten. It is not the same type of pods that colonize our tanks.

If you want a mandarin, it is best to buy some cheato as usualy it is full of the right kind of pods and add live phyto on regular basis as pods eat phyto and without it, they won't thrive. Sometime just adding life phyto is enough to bring them back even if you think they are not there any more.

I treated my tank with Interceptor for black bugs and I could swear all the pods were dead. I have 2 mandarins in my tank so I was a bit worried but by adding live phyto the pod recovered in a few weeks.

Also it is a good think to get yourself a live white worm culture before you get your mandarin, as it is an excellent base food for them so even if the pod population would be low, they would be fat and healthy with these. I feed my mandarins live white worms each day and they love it. I have my female for 2 1/2 years and the male for 2 years. They spawn regulary.

My female love those worms so much that she swim after then in the water column and eat them while they are floating in the water. Of course I turn the pumps off so that they have time to catch the worms.