ORA mandarins!!!

[glennr1978]

I just saw on another board that ORA will soon be releasing captive bred mandarins. Additionally, these fish have all been trained to eat frozen food!!

Sweet, I know what my next fish will be!!

[Europhyllia]

Very cool! Wittenrich had been alluding to commercially captive breds for awhile. I was wondering when it was going to happen.
Since they take such special care (smallest larvae) and time I wonder how they are able to make it profitable. I hope people will be willing to pay the price.

[d3rryc]

Here's [link]an article (http://glassbox-design.com/2010/ora-mandarin-goby-captive-bred/)[link] about them from Glassbox Design.

[corruption]

Karin -- considering the wide variety already being bred by ORA, the foods necessary are probably available already (I'd imagine they have a wide range of live foods being produced in the facilities -- they've always shown to be more about doing it right than turnover for profit)... Especially considering that they're directly tied to research facilities in Florida (if I recall correct), food variety is probably wide. I expect em to be pricey, but not like the RCT angels were when available -- those took a lot more work, and had exceedingly high mortality rates in the spawns.

-Justin

[Europhyllia]

Yeah, I was just wondering if people could appreciate that even S rotifers would be too big for mandarin larvae. It's the major challenge in breeding them.
To raise them in large numbers you'd have to have access to large amounts of a tonsa eggs or similar (much less efficient than cranking out rotifers).

[corruption]

ORA was born out of an aquaculture/oceanic research facility -- their access and availability is likely a big boon for ORA itself. I mean -- I fully expect these to hit the market at a retail of about $100 at first, maybe higher -- this has been a long time coming :) I think they'll be able to manage it well enough to realistically bring the cost down over time, just as all their tank bred efforts have...

-Justin

[Europhyllia]

Very cool. I read about it in the April issue of Coral last year and even wrote Wittenrcih to see how soon. Very exciting!

[Kristy]

One of my favorite topics... and such an exciting measure of progress for this field!

[edshas2]

Wow that sounds awesome, mandarins are cool looking fish but so hard to feed.

[glennr1978]

Wow that sounds awesome, mandarins are cool looking fish but so hard to feed.

That's the exciting part, these won't be hard to feed.