novahobbies
Well-Known Member
As I review my prospects of future employment in a distant town (I may be moving to DC), I am faced with an unpleasant decision: my 110 gallon tank is going to have to be shut down. I won't be able to keep it in the place I'm moving to, and the family members who are staying behind for a few months just don't have the time and resources to keep it running anyway. The silver lining in all this is I can take my 37 gallon tank with its seahorse tenant, and I have chosen a couple fish from the Big Tank who can live peacefully in the seahorse tank. Naturally, my big peach toadstool is making the transition, as is a McCoscker's flasher wrasse and a small selection of nassarius and fighting conch snails.
A much harder decision to make will be what to do with my two green mandarins in the big tank. I have a male and a female who have spawned together a few times in the past. I would like to keep the female, but I haven't decided fully yet. My wife is pushing to keep the much larger male, who does eat frozen mysis from time to time.
And there's my dilemma. Do I take the smaller female, who doesn't eat frozen but obviously doesn't eat as much food since she's.....petite
..... or do I take the big boy who may decimate a pod population faster but eats frozen if he has to? The reason it's such a hard decision for me is because female green mandarins are kind of hard to find anymore. People clamor for the males with their display behavior and their spikes, so I can always find another big male when I set up the big tank in a couple years. Females are simply hard to find.
My 37 gallon tank has about 40 lbs of porous live tufa rock, macro algae growing in the tank itself, and a trickle sump that has glass rings in the bottom of the pump area. The walls of this tank are constantly crawling with pods, and the last time I cleaned the bottom of the sump I discovered a huge population of amphipods and certainly copepods feeding on the detritus down there. Pods don't really need the light from a common 'fuge, so I started wondering - is it possible to keep a mandarin-sized menu of pods breeding in a common sump filter? Does anyone have any experience with this?
A much harder decision to make will be what to do with my two green mandarins in the big tank. I have a male and a female who have spawned together a few times in the past. I would like to keep the female, but I haven't decided fully yet. My wife is pushing to keep the much larger male, who does eat frozen mysis from time to time.
And there's my dilemma. Do I take the smaller female, who doesn't eat frozen but obviously doesn't eat as much food since she's.....petite
My 37 gallon tank has about 40 lbs of porous live tufa rock, macro algae growing in the tank itself, and a trickle sump that has glass rings in the bottom of the pump area. The walls of this tank are constantly crawling with pods, and the last time I cleaned the bottom of the sump I discovered a huge population of amphipods and certainly copepods feeding on the detritus down there. Pods don't really need the light from a common 'fuge, so I started wondering - is it possible to keep a mandarin-sized menu of pods breeding in a common sump filter? Does anyone have any experience with this?
