The Puffer Forum

I hope I'm not jumping the gun on this, but after having my Congo Puffer for 2.5 weeks, he still has yet to eat. Anything. I've tried stick feeding for a half hour every second day to no avail, using both krill and mussels. If he's buried in the sand, he'll watch the food on the stick but won't make...

The tank was cycled about 2.5 years ago with fish. It was a community tank up until the night before I got the Congo Puffer, when I put all the fish from it (7 fish, each 3-5") into my larger, 60G community. Also, he is tank mates with 3 Ghost Shrimp (feeder shrimp until I get him trusting me e...

After a never-ending string of bad luck trying to keep Figure-Eight Puffers (3 out of 4 dying of parasites within a week of purchase), I scrapped my 20 gallon brackish tank and decided to focus on my remaining ones. However, the puffer addiction stayed strong. I had wanted to keep a Congo Puffer for...

I'm running an Aquaclear 200 with a filter sponge, filter floss and ceramic Biomax beads.

Very strange.
Fortunately, my tap water comes clean as a whistle (0/0/0 all around).
I'll probably end up buying a different test kit (ugh, probably strips; all they sell around here are strips and Nutrafin liquid tests).
Thanks for the info!

Ever since the horrible death of my Figure 8, I've been keeping the tank cycled by adding in 6 drops of pure ammonia daily (15 gallon tank). However, even while the puffer was in the tank and I was sure it was fully cycled, I had a minute Nitrite reading on my Nutrafin test (~1ppm) even though nitra...

A salt water dip sounds like a very good preventative idea. Other than the salt water dip, our best bet seems to be just waiting the flukes out (short of sterilizing the tank, that is). The professor who did the autopsy figured that the amount of salt that mollies are generally kept in should be suf...

It's been a while since I posted on this, but it's time for a conclusion. I was unable to perform any autopsy myself due to the concerns of my boss (we do a lot of work with tissue cultures and though the risk of contamination is low, it's safest not to work with something that could be transferred ...

That sounds strangely similar to what happened to my Figure 8 last night. Check my thread further down to see if the picture in it is what yours looks like.

It's looking grim. :( That's two Figure 8's within a week from the same LFS. I am NOT going back to that LFS for my puffer needs, suffice to say. There's a salt water place relatively close to me that can order one in and that has a 2-week quarantine for all of their fish. It'll be more expensive an...

He's turning for the worse. Got sucked against my filter intake a couple times and has just (in the past few minutes) started turning upside-down up top. Barring optimism, he's not going to make it.

Edit - he's lying on his side now, barely breathing (and when he does, it's heavy).

Sorry about that; down-sizing as we speak. The left gill is now free of the bloodworm, or whatever it was. It's opening and closing properly. The right gill still has whatever it is poking out of it. The puffer's not gasping at the surface as much anymore, but is still acting fairly disoriented (bum...

It does look a lot like a blood worm in person. I've heard of fish getting them caught in their gills before, and I do feed him blood worms (he had a bloodworm breakfast). I'm hoping that's all it is; but his behavior indicates something is definitely wrong (he's been running into things and buzzing...

Argh; it's now coming out of both gills.

Hello again, everyone! I was hoping my first post on this forum would be in the brackish forum, not the hospital, but here goes: If you read my thread on the other forum, my first Figure 8 puffer that I purchased last Monday died one day later under mysterious circumstances. I did a large water chan...