I don't think the LFS have time and energy to train them to eat or at least try to feed them. 5 Days at the LFS and who knows how many days they were in transit and holding facilities, you would be buying some dying mandarin fish by now.

It's very disgusting to bring 100 mandarins in at once. Accidental or not.

Someone should start a tracking project to see how many of the fish from this purchase will survive in 1 month, 2 months, 3 months....We have a very large sample size.

Was in there today and they had about 16 left. They were also putting in live bottles of tiger pods into the tank to feed them.

Don't blame the LFS for this one. It was their supplier who sent so many when the store only ordered 2. Stores do their best to order both what will live & what will sell, but sometimes suppliers just "dump" their unwanted stock into a store's order knowing the store will not be able to ship the unordered excess back.

+1

Was in there last night just before closing and they still had some left. He said they hadn't been eating at all.

I picked up one for my 90G and one for a friend from the valley who has a RSM tank.

I'm crossing my fingers as I don't really have any pod predators in my tank right now to compete with.

I'd bet King Ed has had the shortest stay time of Mandarin's in the history of their store this week because of this. The fact that they've been able to move almost 100 of them in less than a week is a freakin' miracle.

The store doesn't have the time to train them onto other food nor live rock to feed them. You'd definitely be getting a hungry mandarin but if you have lots of pods he'll eat like mad once he's in the tank. Mine was going to town within minutes of being in there.

I grabbed a male and female today. They are acclimating now.

I just felt like it's worth a shot trying to save these two even though they seem very skinny.

There were about 8-9 left at 1pm today.

If you've got a large pod population they'll probably be alright. I'd get them right into the main tank rather than waiting in a 5.5G like you suggested. Try giving them bloodworms if you need to but you'll find they'll start picking your rocks pretty quick. I only got mine 2 days ago, so they might be skinny and hungry but certainly not goners.

Yes, I agree. I plan on putting them in the big tank.

Any updates from anyone who picked these guys up?

I picked up 2, one for myself and a buddy.

Mine is doing really well and within the last week has taken fondly to frozen Mysis (I did not intentionally attempt to get it to start eating frozen by doing anything special -- he just randomly started eating it during normal feeding time). I believe I have a good pod population.

My Buddy's picked up on frozen food within days which was great. But unfortunately he thinks it attempted to go down in a shrimp/goby burrow hole under the rockwork and got stuck and presumably died. Nothing in the tank could have eaten it, and it's not in the rockwork anywhere.