Help Heffer Fish (Miracle GSP)

[mk1spyder]

Coming here because we have tried everything we can think of within reason. A little background. My GF purchased Hef before I ever met her. He came from walmart and is my first experience with a green spotted puffer. I swear this fish is smarter than me and has more personality than a dog. He literally figured out how to beg for food and trick us into thinking he needed more by changing his colors until he got some. I know a lot of this is going to sound like improper care to professionals but understand that he has been 100% healthy for 7 years until about 3 weeks ago.

So his PH is like 7.2, Nitrite is in the normal range on the test strips, salinity is 1.022, and ammonia is in the normal range on his in take meter. Starting out she had him in just a 5 gallon tank with a simple electric filter and he ate only tropical flakes and scallops. A few decorations nothing fancy, he did great for 2 years like that. Then I met her and got him a 10 gallon tank, higher quality filter (not the natural method with living rock and such I know), and some new decorations. Water changes were total water changes every couple months where we disassembled the entire tank to clean the brown algae type stuff off the glass and decorations, we used only water no chemicals. And we used only distilled bottled water to fill the tank, started out with half a bag of salt and now were using an entire bag of salt which puts it right around 1.022. He didn't seem to mind the total water changes or the shock of being pulled in and out of the tank every couple months. Always super active always hungry always healthy. We love him to death and would do anything for him but never wanted to make it too complicated because he seemed to enjoy it just fine. So time goes on and we had to trim his beak a couple times, fed him some snails, ghost shrimp once, started feeding him dried krill and dried river shrimp lately. Then it all started. So we had his tank down on the first floor which has white walls and he was getting direct sunlight, so of course the brown algae type stuff built up pretty fast but he was happy as could be. His decorations were old and hard to clean all the algae stuff off of so we decided to replace it all with new stuff. Went down to petsmart and bought some new items and new gravel, and washed it of course with water before putting it into the tank. So we changed up his decorations and put him back in. Immediately he was not happy about this, at the same time we moved him upstairs out of direct sunlight and into a room with dark gray/black walls. He glass surfed constantly like he was trying to fight something or get out. So we thought maybe his levels were off, tested the water and everything was spot on. Thought maybe he could see his reflection with the dark walls so we put a white lab coat over the tank didn't seem to help. Tried different food tried paying him more attention less attention, tried just leaving him alone, and then a week or 2x after he seemed to be just fine. Went back to his normal routine and all was good. That lasted for about 2 weeks and then he just stopped eating, he would literally swim away from the food jar if you held it up to the glass which he obviously recognized because he used to get super excited when he saw it. Week 1 got him to eat a chunk of scallop when I basically dropped it on him and he saw it moving. Came back a few hours later and he had puked most of it up on the tank floor. Week 2 got him to eat 1 dried river shrimp the whole week and he seemed to keep it down. But he is much more timid, you can see where his spikes are, he is not as green more of a yellow but his belly still goes all white when he is swimming around and his fin still spreads out wide. SO we thought he might be home sick, went back to petsmart and bought duplicates of his old decorations and gravel the same color as what he used to have, changed it all out and then taped white paper to the back and one side of his tank (the sides that are closest to dark walls). This doesn't seem to have helped at all, he is still acting weird, just floating in spots sitting still when his light is off, he likes to hang out by the heater now when he never used to do that. If you turn his light on he'll swim around a bit but if he sees you he'll run away and hide under his filter, refuses to eat, is scared of the food jar, it is pretty much the saddest thing I've ever seen and I'm a grown man. I feel terrible like we did this to him because we probably did but he did perfect for 7 years which is really impressive for a walmart fish and amateur owners. Honestly we are not going to invest in $100's of dollars of a big 30 gallon tank with living rock and weekly water changes, but I also don't see why what we have been doing has worked fine for 7 years and now all the sudden he hates us, he doesn't look like he has worms or ICH or whatever.

Maybe it is his time to go, I sure hope not, I'm also hoping there is something simple that we can do to fix this. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated and if it works i'll gladly paypal you some money for helping us.

[Pufferpunk]

5 years, is relatively young in a GSP's life, as they easily live into their teens. The complete cleaning of your tank is very stressful to him & even more stressful to the bacteria in there. You might want to do some reading:
http://www.thepufferforum.com/forum/lib ... d-puffers/
http://www.thepufferforum.com/forum/lib ... y/feeding/
http://www.thepufferforum.com/forum/lib ... obespart1/
http://www.thepufferforum.com/forum/lib ... obespart2/
http://www.thepufferforum.com/forum/lib ... iltration/
http://www.thepufferforum.com/forum/lib ... roments-2/

You say you don't want to deal with LR & weekly WC but this is how you heep a fish healthy--long term! For the 40 years I've been keeping fish, I have been doing 50% weekly WC. I have a puffer who is approaching 18 years old. Actually, with LR & a total marine system, you'd only need to do about 1/3 WC every 3 weeks, so the maintenance is much easier. I'd get the 30g (actually a 55g would be MUCH better!) & add a HOB protein skimmer to it. Also, your substrate is all wrong. Aragonite sand is what you want, to maintain the pH closer to 8.