Puffer books

[amzwiz87]

Hey I recently got my first puffer, a figure 8 named Moe, and I did alot of research online before I got him on care taking. After I bought him tho I got to wondering about their lives in the wild and tried to find out online with no luck. So, I went to ever local store and library trying to find a good book on puffers in general and still had no luck. I am going to go online to look for a book on puffers and just want to know ahead of time if anyone knows of any good ones (I hate buying books without getting to peak inside them!) haha...thanks for any tips guys!

[edmlfc1]

No need to buy a book, just flip through the pages on this site and start reading. It's the best book on the internet and it's all about puffers.


Seriously, I have not seen any good puffer books.

[j_wishbone]

...and when you do see some

recommended care is very generic..

it could almost be translated to goldfish care

haha

[Pufferpunk]

Only puffer book I regularly refer to is: The Puffers of Fresh & Brackish Waters, by Klaus Ebert. It's an Aqualog book, probably can be found at Amazon. Be sure to check out our F8 article in the Library.

Book Review: Klaus Ebert’s “The Puffers of Fresh and Brackish Waters”
Author: Robert T. Ricketts
AT LAST! A Book Devoted to Fresh and Brackish Water Puffers
• Title: The Puffers of Fresh and Brackish Waters
• Author: Dr. Klaus Ebert
• Publisher: AQUALOG Verlag
• ISBN: 3-931702-60-X
• Overview: Hard cover, 96 pages, ~300 pictures, short chapters on pufferfish biology and maintenance, details on freshwater and brackish water puffers (36 species), geographic sections of pufferfish distribution, plus a section of marine puffers commonly found in brackish conditions when immature.
This book is not inexpensive, but Aqualog volumes never are. With the number and reproduction quality of the numerous photographs always seen from this publisher, low cost is hardly possible. The author of this book is a biologist with a long-term interest in puffers and he includes personal notes from his experiences with many of the puffers we see available to us. I do not always agree 100% with his comments, as he considers some of the puffers “community fish”. That position I take with a large grain of salt. However, he does emphasize in several places that these fish have significant individual personalities within a species, so that individual behavior is not uniformly predictable.
The author or editors take pains to disavow the use of the text as a taxonomic reference, which is fine for taxonomists. For hobbyists, the pairing of scientific and common names with excellent pictures is an invaluable resource. Now we can discuss a particular fish among ourselves with this book as a common language “dictionary,” ensuring that we are all talking about the same fish. This alone is worth the price of the book for me. In the world of hobby puffers it is routine for a thread on the boards or the puffer list to go several cycles before it is realized that folk are discussing different fish. Unfortunately, not everyone will be able or willing to invest in the book, but it has to help long-term with developing some consistency in what we call these fish.
The author does point out the differences in the behavior and sociability of the various FW (fresh water) and BW (brackish water) species, and the generalization that the BW species commonly seen are more sociable than many of the FW lurking predators. Occasionally his scientist rather than hobbyist background may get in the way of understanding and communication. He reports that for him, certain common species may be kept in groups without difficulty, adding that any members of the “community” that develop fin-nipping habits are simply removed. Yeah, sure. For a scientist, or for the dedicated hobbyist with dozens of tanks, certainly this can be done. For the average hobbyist with fewer than a handful of tanks, this may not be so easy or certain.
I do trust Dr. Ebert’s descriptions of the fresh water versus the brackish water fish in the group, and his careful notes that many or most species are quite adaptable on water chemistry. In several places he pulls in anecdotal reports from his personal experience, which are helpful in showing the difference in the same species kept in differing conditions. For example, the author describes the Common Spotted Puffer, Tetraodon nigroviridis, (which he calls the Green Puffer) kept in freshwater as being only half the size as the same species kept in brackish or marine water. His version of brackish water by the way is approximately 25-30% of normal marine water.
His notes and comments on puffer care are generally quite good as well. He does point out the importance of water changes for these fairly messy fish. They are not quite as sloppy eaters as Oscars, but they are not far behind. Being predators and having a wide range of activity levels, their food requirements are also quite variable. I really appreciate his notes on the frequency or lack thereof on feeding these beasts — the difference in a tank of hyperkinetic Common Spotted puffers and a T. suvattii resting in its cave is huge. As with Goldfish and many Cichlids, avoiding overfeeding these beasts is not easy for the novice, or even the more experienced hobbyists whose long-tern experience is likely to be more with grazers than obligate predators. Folk with long-term reptile experience may be more at home with feeding the lurking predators than the average fish hobbyist.
Dr. Ebert does seem to accept, as do many puffer keepers, the requirement for trimming the incisors of some of these fish. This rather surprises me, as I expected him to emphasize the significance of snails, crustaceans and shellfish in puffer diets for tooth wear and maintenance. But I’m willing to accept that as his individual style. I just wish he had expanded a little on natural techniques for maintaining a healthy bite along with the well-presented technique for tooth trimming he does offer.
Unfortunately, and perhaps my biggest complaint with the whole volume, is that he calls two very different fish (T. nigroviridis and T.fluviatilis) both by the same common name, Green Puffer — perhaps that is the case in Germany. The latter is the “False” Figure-8 puffer, the former the Common Spotted, at least in my local fish stores. The “true” figure-8 is T. biocellatus, both in his text and locally for me. In the broad geographic sections by continents or large areas (Africa, Asia, South America) there are multiple photos of the commoner species, showing many variant markings and greatly assisting in identification of these confusing fish. The multiple pictures of the recently introduced and confusing to ID “dwarf” puffers are a great help also.
The book does show how and why these fish are so fascinating and personable. It should help dispel many myths and mis-understandings about this family and make them more practical for tank-keepers ready to move beyond community tanks to more specialized, and to me more interesting, fish. Certainly not a volume the novice is likely to purchase, but then neither should these fish be casual purchases either. The book does give more than enough information for any hobbyist to be able to successfully maintain any FW or BW puffer that I have seen in the trade. That is far more than I can say about most of the books in my collection. If you have an interest in these fish, this can give at least as much as I have learned in some 40 years of keeping puffers. It is overall a very impressive accomplishment and I suspect that it will be the puffer bible for decades to come.