I've had a mandarin for almost a year now, and he's been doing pretty well overall. Usually out and hunting, but has never been interested in anything I fed the tank. But over the past few days I began to soak the pellet in Selcon again, something I used to do, but had quit for quite a while due to soaking the food in garlic to treat a low level ich infestation (which I'm glad to say seems to be gone now, no signs in over 2 months). Then I noticed the mandarin was active in the area where the food leftovers were sinking. And when I looked closer, I noticed the mandarin was spitting out some of the pellets, but then sucked it back up. The pellets are the small (1mm I think) Thera-A pellet food, soaked for a few minutes before feeding in a few drops of Selcon. Today I tried again just to confirm what I saw, and sure enough almost immediately after adding some food, the mandarin was out and hunting the crumbs of food as they floated by across the sand in the current. He ate a few and seemed to be pretty excited about it, and spent the next 15 minutes combing the sand in that area finding a few more morsels. I have no lack of food for the mandarin, my tank is pretty infested with gammarid amphipods and other critters which have up until now kept him pretty healthy.

And because he was out for so long in one area, I was able to finally snap a decent photo of him:



As you can see, the hermits were also out cleaning up the scraps as well. Not much goes for long in my tank without being eaten.

That's great since I will soon be back in the market for a mandarin. I will try this and see how it goes. Nice pic BTW

That's a really beautiful photo