Finally Seeing Copepods

[RigoSharon]

nice..its time to have a mandarin fish!! cool

[Rcpilot]

No Manderin fish for me. I've heard that 95% of them starve in captivity. I think you'd need a pretty large population of copepods to support an animal that won't eat anything other than copepods.

[Bifferwine]

If you're lucky, you can find a mandarin that eats frozen food. I would not buy one unless I knew it takes frozen.

[Rcpilot]

I've read that some can be trained to eat frozen food. I don't care for the Manderin fish enough to risk starving one to death. I'll just have to let them live in the ocean.

[Rcpilot]

I'm up late. Been staring at my tank for a couple hours. I've spotted a very healthy pod population in the tank. I knew I had them in the refugium. I'm sure they came from the live rocks and migrated into the refugium. But, I've just never seen them in the tank before. I had looked, but not REALLY got down and looked closely.

They are all over the place. I spotted one crawling around on a rock. It was actually in the path of my big giant snail. It jumped and ran out of the way of the snails mouth just in the nic of time. I dunno is snails eat pods, but this pod was runnin' like he was about to get eaten. It was that movement that made my eye catch sight of it. I was locked in on my big snail--just watching it and admiring the white eyes with the little pupils in the middle--and WHOA!! whats that? hehe! A pod!!

So, I started looking around the edges of the tank near the DSB. Gazillions of them. Maybe this new refugium is moving the water so fast that it's washing pods out. I kinda suspected this, but I'm still seeing them in there. I did buy a less powereful powerhead to plug into the fuge. I plan to install that next week. That will slow the fuge down from 295GPH to 230GPH. I'd rather see it down around 100-150GPH. I don't know if changing the flow rate will bugger up the skimmer. I'll just have to see.

Really excited to see a nice pod population in the tank. Those things wouldn't be alive if my water parameters were way outta whack--right?

Will a 6-line wrasse eat pods?

[Bifferwine]

Sixlines LOOOOOVE to eat pods.

And if they are migrating from your fuge to the main tank, that's a good thing! That way, there will always be a breeding population in the fuge providing a constant live food source to the main tank.

[joeman]

If you want to slow the flow rate from the tank to the fuge you could just put a ball-valve in the flow path and restrict it to whatever you want. This should not adversely affect the skimmer at all.

[yote]

I agree with Joe.
The only effect I think it might have on the skimmer,is to allow it to work the water a little better.

And Yeah,six-lines and pods go together like ole Yote and venison tender loin.