ollie231 wrote:thanks, I use stress zyme and tapsafe each time I do a water change. like I say the nitrites and nitrates are a little higher and I'm hoping it is down to that, I was just paranoid that there is a permanent issue with the change in hardness
Hello ollie and welcome to The Puffer Fourm. You sure you have a Takifugu Ocellatus? You might want to start a new topic with pictures to get a for sure ID. 29gl./101 lt is just to small for these guys. Min tank size suggested is 55gl/200lt. Do you have a chiller?
oh yeah I'm certain, slightly stripey olive green body, whitish belly and 2 dorsal black saddles with thick orange bands. Sadly I am a complete technophobe, no camera at all so no pics. Advice taken, prime ordered! no more hijacking if I need more advice I'll join the hospital thread (sorry only just spotted it, was in a panic earlier)
so to get this back on track, another thing to think about seriously is tank location. The first one was really skittish, did not like anybody except for me and my gf, it would bang against the glass if anybody else came near or jump about, clearly in distress. But we would talk to it all the time, and my gf would whistle when she was feeding it. It definitely knew what that sound meant, we even had it squirt water at her sometimes when it was impatient.
But the more recent one is kind of the opposite. In my old house my bedroom was at the top of the stairs, so there was quite a lot of through-traffic. I thought it would want to be kept alone in a quiet place. I would come home and after an hour or so of me being in the room it would become active. Then I started leaving the door open and it loves it! no one comes into the room but it gets excited seeing somebody come up the stairs. I feel like he's lonely but its his own fault, if he wasn't a killing machine maybe he could have a friend
Lovely to hear from someone else who's got one of these wonderful little fish
Looks like you've done really well with him do you mind telling me a bit more about how you've been keeping him? Salinity, temps, pH, foods, um, anything and everything really! I want to get together as much info as I possibly can on these little guys to make sure mine does really well.
Mushroom's already had a go with cockles. The first one I gave him I smashed with a hammer, so he had a really easy time of it! Don't trust myself trying to open the things with a knife, can see that going really wrong very easily... Think I've got the hang of just cracking them now, so he actually has to do a bit of work for his dinner!
I have a Juwel Rekord 800 tank approx. 110 Litres and an eheim 2217 external filter. The UV filter is an AQUAEL UniFilter with the filter pads removed. IF you dont know about UV filters they are basically the same as normal filters with a UV bulb in which kills off any algae. it is designed for a 200-300L tank so quite a heavy flow comes out.
near 1.02 salinity and I took around 2-3 months of very very gradual buildup for that, which is easier to do the bigger the tank. of course, he was sold to me as fresh water, which is partly why i rescued him! no heater in the tank and it fluctuates between 18 and 22, got up to 24 when it was really hot this summer and he was fine.
loads of air pumping in - the UV filter uses air to control flow, and I have an air curtain at the back of the tank. The 2 filters combined cause quite a lot of turbulence but he seems to like it, seems more natural I think.
I have never adjusted the PH but at my old property, PH was 7.7ish-8.1ish. it is 7.9 to 8.2ish now. Not found anywhere that specifies a PH anyway so don't even know if it needs adjusting, but as it seems to be all marine puffers have a suggested PH of the 7.8-8.4 mark its probably fine. Get a digital meter, sticks are unreliable and liquids are an ongoing cost where as investing in a meter earns its higher cost back quickly esp if you own more than one tank.
I have a 110l tank and a 10l bucket. I take about 9.9L of water out almost every day and put 10L back in to account for evaporation from the lights. so it is around 50% water change a week, I spend a fortune on tap safe and stress zyme. Stress zyme is supposed to be live bacteria but according to this site it doesnt work. Well as I have always used it I'm not going to stop, I was using it to reduce ammonia and it seems to work for that at least.
lots of things to see and do. It is clear these fish have a really active brain, and as they are all alone they will need entertaining. A few years ago in a not so local shop was the only time I have seen more than one of these at a time. But it broke my heart, these were clearly wild caught (supposedly all of them are, but I'm not so sure these days) juveniles and they were in a sorry state. I think they had originally been in together as they all had nips to their tail fins. But 2 of the five had sores to their face, I'm pretty sure its from rubbing against the glass or maybe even charging at the glass. So I immediately bought a bigger tank and more "enrichment". I equate it to what zoos do, you can tell when big cats and apes have been given things to do they are clearly happier and more active. An animal with an active brain needs to be stimulated.
So he has 2 caves, a big ornament or two he can swim through as well as around and lots of artificial planting. The low temperature makes it hard to have good quality live planting so I stick to artificial. I move things round in the tank occasionally to help the boredom and spend about half an hour a day looking at the tank around feed time and talking to him. I get live food sometimes to make it more exciting for him.
I spent a lot of time finding the right sand. It is silica sand, but you would be surprised how much even this can vary in texture between brands and even bags of the same brand so try a few sources if you can. Sadly I dont remember the brand. There is only about an inch of sand to prevent "dead sand" or whatever you call it when there's not enough oxygen for it to process nitrites/nitrates/ammonia.
for food he gets mussels, cockles, bloodworm, snails and occasionally a bit of chopped squid tentacle. My local shops sometimes struggle to have a regular supply of cockles and mussels still in the shell, so make sure you always have a supply in, or take a trip to essex to get some fresh cockles on the cheap! I have fed him the occasional goldfish too. Bloodworm and snails are the only cheap food, they have an expensive taste lol. I havent got round to it yet but farming snails sounds like an easy and cheap food source. Frequency depends on the size of food, I always watch him eat as I like to fish out what I can of the waste with a net to keep nitrates nitrites and ammonia down. He gets his fill around every 48 hours.
Personally I think the reason not many of these survive is a combination of problems with their environment - there's the obvious salinity (usually shops telling you its fresh or brackish) and low temperature issues. But actually I think the real killer is stress and boredom. These are almost exclusively wild caught fish. They are cunning predators out there, and then they end up in small tanks with already dead food and nothing to do all day. They cant be with a community because they love to hunt, they're not doing it because they're hungry. they just want looking after like any wild caught animal would
Hobbyist need to be fully aware that the world of the wild and captivity are radically different. We can reproduce certain things from the wild in captivity, and have no hope at all on others.
Plus, big plus, we are not at trying to mimic the hazards of the wild. In fact, we the opposite is true. In the wild the fish can move to different water conditions. In captivity, they are stuck with what we give them. BW fish move to different water conditions seasonally for feeding and breeding. Is this good for them or bad? We do not know. What we do know is that classic BW fish in captivity live longest in stable conditions GSPs and F-8s both do best and live longest in quite different conditions, and what those conditions are may depend in part on where we can provide the best conditions for each. So it is not just the water salinity, but how effectively we can maintain high water quality. My personal conclusion is that water quality trumps salinity by a huge margin. When we can reliably breed those two, I very strongly suspect that breeding in captivity will shorten their lives. Reproduction is costs the parents a lot metabolically and physiologically and more in the wild than in captivity. But in the wild, reproduction is a genetic requirement for gene survival. In captivity it is a luxury. Until we have long-term stable lifespans, breeding attempts are just burning up fish.
For migratory fish - such as the species involved in this thread, we can only consider survival. For that I would bet heavily on stable. zero unoxidized nitrogen and minimum DOCs and minimal nitrates in the water. We can do that for F-8s and GSPs. This species present the huge temperature factor as the biggest complication. I would bet on stability of that parameter as being equally important as the others with which we are more familiar. But we cannot start on looking at temperatures until we have the metabolites down pat - you cannot draw conclusions when all the critical variables or parameters fluctuate.
Wow! Loads of info. Thank you so much. Just to clarify, I'm used to reading that salinity as 1.020, that is what you meant right? Not 1.002? The more I can find out about what other people who've done well with these guys have done, the better chance I reckon I've got. I've been trying to find fugu owners to stalk and harrass with millions of questions!!
RTR, I see what you mean about mimicking the "wild", it's just so hard to know what needs mimicking and what doesn't :-/ (other than the obv bits like bigger fish will eat littler fish!! )
Just to update everyone on Mushroom today;
The glass dancing seems to have totally stopped (horray!) and he's been doing tons of burrowing and leaving little mushroom-shaped dents all over the sand! All in all, I'm pretty pleased that he seems a lot more settled. Although he did turn up his little nose at today's cockle, so I gave in and he got a mussel...
I've tried him with his lights off the last two days, and I wonder if that's made him a happier bunny. Since there aren't likely to ever be any plants in the tank, I reckon I'm going to grab him some much dimmer lights at some point anyway, or I might get him some floating plants (fake ones!) to block a bit of light, and for him to play around in! Haven't really decided yet. Little bit of fishy-shopping at the weekend methinks
I reckon you're defo right, judging from the difference in Mushrooms behaviour. Shame really, because the tank looks really good with the light on! But if Mister Mushroom says no, what choice do us humble humans get?
I was wondering about some cheap LED strips. I mean really cheapy ones, so they hardly light up the tank at all, reckon that might be better that trying to block the light with floating plants. And if they get damaged by the salt in the future, they're all of about a fiver to replace. (no idea what that is in dollars, seven or something maybe? Not a lot either way.)
Oh well, there goes any thoughts I had about maybe experimenting with corals in there in the future! Although tbh, that was a bit of a pipe dream really, I'm quite sure they'd just turn out as expensive tasty treats!
Just found a couple of interesting quotes on another website;
This is a little worrying!
"All trials to acclimate young specimens of 6-8 cm length to full strength seawater failed so no experiments in that direction are recommended."
And this is just quite interesting
"Lexicon: Takifugu: composed from two Japanese words: Taki meaning "waterfall" and Fugu, which is the name of the puffer which causes deadly poisoning when prepared for food in a wrong way; the term has multiple meanings, one can read it in a way that the fish should be cooked in liquid for example. ocellatus: Latin for "with an eyespot"."
Fugu is the term used for all of the puffers served as food in Japan. That involves multiple species, not just one. It is a general term not limited to any single species.
So far as I know, no one has as yet successfully kept this fish for a reasonable lifespan. We are only aware of one individual reporting success for a few years.
Their are no brackish water floating plants suited to tank cultivation, so that is not an option.
Corals are high-light requiring critters. Don't try to run two experiments at once. Just the fish is a big enough hurdle to attempt.
Um, I don't think the floating plants I was thinking of will give me too much jip, they're plastic
As for the low success rate for these guys, I'm on a mission to change that! Give me chance to try
Sadly, Mushroom won't be getting any new goodies today though Turns out I have work. So I'll have to try and sneak out in the week to get his fishy shopping! In the mean time, he seems quite happy with no lights at all, so I doubt he's too bothered.
I think he's in her kitchen, and is getting light from a window or something, so he still has his cycle, which he does indeed need.
If it were me, I'd just go with ambient indirect natural light because it seems most, if not all people who have kept them longer periods had them just with ambient light. Maybe the light source being so close to them, as in directly on their tank, is just too overwhelming for them.
Yep, he's in the kitchen. He's sort of next to a window, but tucked away in the corner so the boiler blocks direct sunlight, but he is still getting light, just not loads.
do you mind telling me a bit more about how you've been keeping him? Salinity, temps, pH, foods, um, anything and everything really! I want to get together as much info as I possibly can on these little guys to make sure mine does really well.
Turns out I have work. So I'll have to try and sneak out in the week to get his fishy shopping! In the mean time, he seems quite happy with no lights at all, so I doubt he's too bothered.