banggai cardinal question

[jeffisme]

We bought a banggai cardinal over the weekend, and I'm wondering whether it was a mistake. It's doing fine in the QT, eating ralph's reef food and cyclopeez. my concern, however, is putting it in the DT, a 55-gallon reef tank ( 75 lbs live rock) that houses not that many fish but it does have a Mandarin. I'm trying to cultivate more copepods because even though it's a pretty well established reef tank, for some reason it's never had a huge amount of copepods. The mandarin is definitely thinner than it should be, although I'm supplementing his diet with nutramar ova which he eats if the cleaner shrimp don't steal it first. Anyway, while the ralph's and cyclopeez will be the cardinal's main source of food, from what I've read they're also serious copepod eaters. we've spent so much time and energy keeping the mandarin alive, I'm concerned the the faster moving cardinal will compete with the mandarin for the copepods and win. Am I wrong?

 

thanks for any advice,

 

jeff

[Electrokate]

I have 5 currently in my 55 (trying to make a pair or two) and they never seem to look down, only get excited about food in the water column. Only time I see them near the bottom is at lights out when they all go hide in a ball under a rock.

[wegotjs]

If your manderine has a shruken stomach 99% he will die. Only way is if you can feed him High quality food and he will eat it multiple times a day( Brine shrimp , mysis, blood worms,ect). I have tried to save many from LFS and never had one come back from shrunken stomach.Most of them are just so picky, good luck .

[jeffisme]

Mine will eat nutramar ova all day if I could get it to him. The turkey baster is hit and miss. Mostly I stick my hand in and put it close to him. Then it's a kind of race between the mandarin and the cleaner shrimp. What's interesting is the mandarin shares a hole with a royal gramma (that tried to push him out the first day but then accepted him), and the royal gramma will actually try to keep the cleaner shrimp away, to the extent that yesterday he bit off a portion of the shrimp's antenna.

 

I've got a bucket of copepods that I'm cultivating, and I'm hoping to put a big portion of them in the main tank. it's a mystery to me why there are so few in there to begin.

[Derbird]

I never had very many pods either. So I bought some on line and got a bottle of tigger pods from the LFS. I never see the online ones unless I clean the sock so I know they are in there. The tigger pods are everywhere. I have little red pods over every rock and all over the glass I think incresing the biodiversity really helped out.

[Barelycuda]

In my experience I have never heard or seen Banggai's even being interested in pods. I had a pair in my 75g with a couple of red scooters and pods all over the place and I can't even ever recalling my banggai even once eating any.

[Cirenus]

My 2 Banggai's have pretty much destroyed all the pods they can get to in my tank, they ate all my bigger ones, so now my Mandarin scours the LR all day for the little ones, I have just recently started getting my Mandarin to start eating some Mysis out of a baster thank god so he wont starve.