Thought I would chime in here. This is just my opinion, but I have a few years experience with having a healthy spawning pair of mandarins and I have taken a lot of time to look at the condition of other mandarins and scooter blenys and find out what they are eating and I have helped a few people bring theirs back to health and select and train new mandarins.
That being said, I know that a single mandarin can easily starve in a really nice, mature, 75 gallon tank with fuge even if it is the only "pod eater" fish.
In my opinion, you need to train them to eat the prepared food you normally feed your tank and you need to be sure to always feed enough that they can get plenty to eat. Live food might be enough to let them survive but it is unlikely to let them thrive. There is a big difference between a mandarin that is surviving and a mandarin which is thriving.
You can not expect the bottled pods to do anything. The bottled ones are the babies which are too small for the mandarins to eat until they mature. The tiger pods are about what a mandarin would go through in a few minutes. The amount an adult mandarin wants to eat is the size of 10-20 frozen PE mysis per day. With that volume of food you can understand why live is probably not the answer unless you culture something large and healthy like copeopods, flatworms or mysis.
Live food is doubly dangerous because the population will wax and wane and you never know what sort of issues your tank will go through which may kill the pods your mandarin is surviving on.
For all of those reasons I think it is crucial to train them to eat the food you feed your tank, and to feed your tank good food. I prefer PE mysis because it is healthy, and it is food shaped and easy to train fish to eat.
I always buy mandarins that I see eating at the store. It is better to see them eat something other than just brine, but if you see them watching the food as it falls through the water then go after it that is great. Training them that food is the stuff that falls from the sky rather than food crawls out of a rock is the major part of the battle.
If you do need to train I prefer doing it with a turkey baster. You need one with a transparent tube. you put a bit of mysis in and squeeze the bulb in and out to make the mysis look like it is running around inside of the tube. Once the mandarin sees this, you let a mysis pop out the end and he thinks that a foolish pod has come out of the cave. Once he has connected the baster with food, over a few days you move it to the surface when you feed and then he will have the idea of looking for mysis from the sky.
A thin or starving mandarin learns best after being fattened up with a stay in a pod rich fuge with no other fish.
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