Goby Question

[scubachris]

Ok I have a question. I am interested in getting a small manderin goby for my tank. Im sure some will say my tank is not big enough, but my buddy whom I have known for years has had one in the same size tank for years and it is doing great. My question is, if I buy a bottle of copapods and put the entire bottle into my tank, and let it have a month or so to reproduce and spread throughout my liverock. Will that be able to sustain the one goby over a period of time?

 

[nycbob]

how much liverocks do u hv and how old is the tank? what fish do u hv currently?

 

[scubachris]

I have a 30g tank with about 35-40 lb of lr. I have 2 clowns, and a small fox face.

 

[scubachris]

Anything?

 

[nycbob]

i'd say no to a mandarin. ur chance of success is very slim.

 

[natclanwy]

I would agree no mandarin, your chances of success are slim to none not sure what your friend is doing to keep his alive but he is very lucky. I just did some work on a 55g that had about 50-70lbs of live rock that had a mandarin that was very emaciated in fact it didn't survive the movement to a rubber maid tub while we re-landscaped the DT. They had been buying pods to try and feed the mandarin but it still wasn't enough.

 

[dennis210]

I have to agree with other posters and say no. To answer your question of adding pods and waiting - most will be filtered out, eaten, or die during transition. So chances of having a sustainable population to feed a mandarin are slim. Also just buying pods to feed a mandarin would be costly. A bottle with 200 - 300 in it would be maybe a 3 day supply if all were consumable.

 

[scubachris]

OK well let me ask a stupid question. Besides size, what makes a larger tank say 55 or 100g able to support a goby? Why would a tank that size be able to sustain a population of pods large enough to keep a goby alive?

 

[natclanwy]

It's not just the larger system it is the volume of LR and you just can't get the volume of rock in a smaller tank. The more LR you have the more habitat you have for sustaining pods and the more areas they have to hide, even on a large system it is important to have areas that are inaccessible to the mandarin such as a rubble pile or a refuge so that the pods have a place to live and breed in peace otherwise the mandarin will hunt them into near extinction. Just dumping a bottle of pods in a small tank will feed the mandarin for a short period of time but whatever the mandarin doesn't eat will likely die because the system is not capable of handling that many pods.