Dragonets - Beautiful fish but one I strongly believe shouldn't be so easily available (unless they come from a tank bred source which at the moment is very unlikely). So sorry for my slight biased in posting style here
I have also had success and failure with these fish so I know both sides of the story first hand.
Point to note. Scooter Blennies are also Dragonets and should be treated exactly the same as mandarins.
These are all beautiful fish with bundles of personality and despite the one major difficulty of feeding them they are relatively hardy fish.
The main thing to think about when keeping dragonets (and I will qualify this statement) is "they will NOT eat prepared foods". Be that frozen, flake, pellets or any other "non-live" food.
Now technically this statement is not true. My mandarin will eat frozen food and many others will eat pellets and frozen. However the reason I say they will not eat prepared foods is because they are VERY docile feeders and not active swimmers. In your typical marine setup when you feed in the normal way the dragonet will not get chance to get to any food before the other fish do.
If you are VERY dedicated you can target feed them (I used to target feed a pink scooter blenny but it is a huge PITA and means having to put your hands in the tank 3 times a day which is not good at all). You could also use a "diner" setup (see link in seffies post above)however this also requires dedication and there is no guarantees it will work. Also if you have other similar sized fish that feed from the same area they will again be out competed for food.
As such I would say if you get a Dragonet always assume that it is never going to eat prepared foods. Chance are it might do but don't count on it. Enough of these fish end up dying in peoples tanks through starvation and we shouldn't be encouraging or taking part in this.
So what will they eat? the answer is pods, lots and lots of pods! You should never underestimate just how many pods these little guys will chop through.
In a larger MATURE tank (as above generally with over 90lbs of LR)the pods population will grow rapidly enough to provided a constant source of food for them. If you have other fish that have similar diets though then you may want to supplement the pods.
In smaller tanks you have to decide if you are going to be dedicated enough to culture food for them. This is not an optional step, it is IMO a requirement.
The details for culturing pods are posted above but one thing I don't think was mentioned is that you need to have more than one culture going (3 or 4 is ideal). Cultures do crash for no obvious reason at all and if you only have one culture then your dragonet is going to go hungry. Despite what people may tell you culturing food is a chore and you should seriously sit down and think if you are going to be willing to keep on top of it. You can buy live pods but this works out VERY expensive in the long term so unless your pretty well off then you are back to culturing them.
There are also ways to help increase the pod cultures in your tank (but don't count on these to provide all the pods in a smaller tank):
- Have a refugium set up in the main display tank. Having it in the sump will help a bit but most the pods wont make it from the sump to the display tank.
- Have a "rubble zone" in the display tank. This can be some out of the way spot which cant be seen but an area of LR rubble which the fish cant get into gives the pods a protected place to reproduce.
- Dose the tank with phyto. This gives the pods and other critters a good food source. Be careful when dosing in smaller tanks as it can be bad for water quality when not done right.
Breeding:
These fish have been breed in captivity and pairs will readily spawn. They need a "tall" tank to do this as they swim up into the water column. However raising them is very, very difficult. They go through several larval stages which require very specific live foods (generally smaller than rotifers). For this reason there are very rarely tank bred mandarins available.
There are now some people that are mastering this on a commercial scale so over the next couple of years tank breed mandys should be more common.
Sexing:
As in an above post male mandarins have a longer dorsal spine. However all juvenile mandarins look like females so this isn't 100% reliable.
Important point to note. Assuming your food supply can support it you can keep several dragonets in the same tank. However you can keep no more than 1 male. If you have two males they will certainly fight until one or both of them is dead.
A vast majority of mandarins you see for sell will be males. This is because they are a lot easier to catch on the reef due to being bigger.
This is my first dragonet. A Pink scooter blenny. I had this for a few months and target fed it every day with frozen food. It was kept in a 130l tank with about 25-20KG of LR which was well mature. However it started to lose weight and target feeding 3 times a day is REALLY not practical. I passed it on to a local reefer with a big mature tank and last I spoke it was doing really well.
I don't have a photo to hand of my current mandarin. Its a green spotted mandarin, its in a 100g tank with about 50kg of LR. We have had it for quite awhile now and it is getting very fat. We don't supplement its feeding but do have macro algae's in the display tank and a very good pod population. It has also recently started eating frozen food but this is only because we have had a change in feeding style. We now feed 4 times a day, 3 of which is with a mix of normal and chopped frozen food (we have a LOT of difficult to feed fish). It has only started eating frozen since we started feeding this amount of food and in a smaller tank feeding this much would soon mess up your water quality.
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