The Puffer Forum

Hello everyone,
I'm new to the forum. I've kept a GSP in the past.. I recently got back into the aquarium hobby and wanted to get into puffers. I'm really interested in a mbu and the amazon puffers. I was curious if anyone has kept them in a large community tank together? I am in the process of tearing down an oceanic 220 (7x2x2) tank to build my own 8'x4'x2.5' approx 600 gallon tank. I'm building this purely for the puffer but i want more than just the one fish in there lol. Ive seen aquarium coop has a mbu with guppies which seems simple enough. I may just do that and plant the heck out of the back foot of the tank or so. Any thoughts, tips, suggestion are more than welcome. Thanks in advance!!

Welcome to the forum. Amazon puffers are amazing fish to keep but are not suited to community life. They will take the easy option of soft foods over the masses of crunchy food they need to keep their teeth short. This leads to you performing regular dentistry on them. That would make a great sap tank though! A mbu could likely live in there if you had extreme filtration, personally I would like to give a little more swimming room to a monster like that though. If you are good at building tanks you could easily drill a pane of glass as a divider and have a puffer one side and other fish like guppies on the other side?

With few exceptions (VERY few), puffers do not do well in "community" tanks.
A glass divider will probably result in stressed fish on both sides of it.

bertie 83 wrote:Welcome to the forum. Amazon puffers are amazing fish to keep but are not suited to community life. They will take the easy option of soft foods over the masses of crunchy food they need to keep their teeth short. This leads to you performing regular dentistry on them. That would make a great sap tank though! A mbu could likely live in there if you had extreme filtration, personally I would like to give a little more swimming room to a monster like that though. If you are good at building tanks you could easily drill a pane of glass as a divider and have a puffer one side and other fish like guppies on the other side?

I was under the impression amazon puffer and South American puffers are the same. I mean the amazon river runs through South America... am I not correct on this? Also I have seen Cory at aquarium coop keep a mbu with guppies. He has him in a 350 gallon I believe. I know filtration is an issue. I was thinking on doing a drip system with a large 55 gallon moving bed filter along with other filtration. My main question was will the two types of puffers get along? I suppose I can just trial and error it though lol.

Yes sorry my post was unclear, I referred to the same puffer by 2 different names. I would not mix the amazons with a mbu, that is a recipe for disaster. The mbu could easily eat a skittish Amazon, or the amazons could nip at the slower more clumsy mbu