Relationship To Humans
Despite their popularity in the aquarium trade, mandarinfish are considered difficult to keep, as their feeding habits are very specific. Some fish never adapt to aquarium life, refusing to eat anything but live amphipods and copepods (as in the wild), though individuals that do acclimatize to aquarium food are considered to be quite hardy and highly resistant to diseases such as marine ich. They less likely to contract the disease Cryptocaryon because they do not have the skin type that this common aquarium disease affects. In the aquarium trade it is easy to "fall in love" with this beautiful fish. All too often someone with a little bit of experience and a matured aquarium with a flourishing population of "pods" will think that their tank is ready for a mandarin, but you need more than just a current "flourishing pod population" you need a sustainable population. The best way to do this is to build a refugium with seaweeds and other algae to feed the Pod's. As far as how big of a refugium you should get, the bigger the better, but at least twenty percent of the show aquarium should be okay. As far as the actual tank size for housing the mandarin, it should be no less than a fifty gallons per mandarin with at least 1 lb of live rock per every gallon, and make sure that it has at least two free square of live sand (preferably with some small amounts of hair algae. The mandarinfish appeared on a 39 kip postage stamp from Laos issued in 1987, and a 40 cent postage stamp of the Federated States of Micronesia issued on 26 August 1993.
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