Blue mandarins?

Question

I have heard they are hard to keep, please tell me stories and how you keept your mandarins

Answer 1

You heard correctly. Extremely hard to keep alive because they need very small living foods (copepods, small shrimp) that breed in the live rock. You need a 40 gallon mature (running for 6 months plus) tank with lots of live rock to even begin to think about keeping one, and if for any reason it dies (and starvation is usually the primary cause of death), their skin releases a toxin which can kill other fish in the tank (I lost a canary blenny to one). That's one of the reasons for their bizzare coloration - to warn other fish not to eat them. They may accept live bottled copepods or not, but these cost on average $28 per bottle and they can go through about 2 bottles of food each week.

If you can get them to eat frozen foods (and a few can be trained to do so), they're slow swimmers, so you can't keep them with fish that can get to food faster than they can - otherwise, they still starve. If you decide to buy one, make sure you see it eating in the store first - if it won't eat there, chances are good it won't eat for you either. You want one that has a well filled-out abdomen to show it's been eating regularly, not something that's sunken in showing either starvation or internal parasites - see photos for comparison in a link I'll post below.

Because these are small, peaceful fish, they wouldn't make a good mix with the tangs or angel you want.

These are territorial, so only one to a tank.

There was an article about these in the Feb. 2007 issue of Tropical Fish Hobbyist - the author tanked about the problems he had in trying to keep them - only one ate the bottled copepods, but he got another to eat some type of fish eggs he found in an Asian market. You might try and see if you can find a copy of that to read as well for info.