Feeding and brackish plants

[SarahJane]

HI

My new puffers have eaten all the little snails in their tank and are now clearly bored of the bloodworms! I wan tto give them something that will keep them occupied searching for it if possible, can anyone reccomend some exciting new foods for them and also where to get them )online if poss) as I don't have a good aquarium store nearby.

I also need to plant the tank up more but am struggling to source plants whcih will be ok in brackish water - again I would probably need to source these on the internet if possible.

Thanks
X

[Pandora114]

http://www.aquariumplants.com for all your aquarium plants needs. Even have a brackish section.

[Pufferpunk]

There is a sticky in the BW tank forum on BW plants.

[Myaj]

I see Wilma has changed her website, but I found the new one! Here's a place a lot of us like to order snails from:

http://www.wilmasthecause.org/Packages.html

How brackish is your water? If its higher brackish you can start to look at macro algae that grows in marine conditions. If its lower, there are still a few plants that can handle it.

[sarina23]

What kind of substrate do you have? I have snails in there and I rarely ever need to replinish them because they are in the sand and when they come up the puffers get them. So they are constantly hunting them. You might want to burry a bunch of the trumpet snails in the sand. Oh and a moss ball is good to put in there, I had one in the brackish tank for almost a year, until I moved it to a freshwater cichlid tank and it got chewed up!!

[Myaj]

Malaysian trumpet snails can be a bit dangerous to feed to puffers. Their shells are so hard they can actually break off a tooth, leading to infection or uneven growth.

[sarina23]

Really? Are there other snails that I could get that I wouldn't have to constantly put in more? :-\

[Myaj]

Not really.. pond and ramshorn are the two types that most of us feed, but if you put them in the tank the puffers will hunt them down, its their favorite food by far. Most of us have separate snail breeding setups.

[marksrush]

Malaysian trumpet snails can be a bit dangerous to feed to puffers. Their shells are so hard they can actually break off a tooth, leading to infection or uneven growth.

I knew it! I had a bad feeling about those snails from the beginning, when I got my first GSP and was looking for snails for him. I had to crush the snails for him myself, and it wasn't all that easy.

[Nick]

My GSPs have no trouble biting REALLY hard things, including live rock, etc. It seems F8's are a bit more brittle of tooth, the firsthand accounts I have heard of tooth breakage all involved F8's. Personally, I would feed them to my GSPs, but not to F8's or similar puffers. Can MTS survive full marine at all, I wonder?