How long do GSPs take to mature?

[liquid88]

How long does it take a GSP to reach full size? I've had Cookie for about 10 weeks now and she has grown considerably. When I got her she was about an inch long, now she's around 2 inches.

[xmikebrock]

REALLY!!!???

thats awesome haha
ive had mine for like 1 1/5 yrs and it only grew like a little lmao

wat r u feeding/how big of tank?

[bigfatfish]

Both mine were about three quarters of an inch when I got them. They have doubled in size in 5 months. They are in a 55 UK gallon tank (UK gallons are bigger than US) with a few ghost shrimp. They eat mostly snails/mussels & other molluscs/crustaceans from the beach - which I then freeze & thaw as required. Also they get a variety of the usual frozen foods (soaked in vits) krill/bloodworm/brineshrimp etc. Live foods - earthworms, shrimp, snails, bloodworms etc.
I can't wait for them to get bigger though!

[RTR]

To get to and above 6" (full size ~6 1/2 "), at least 2+ - 3 years, maybe longer. But to reach maturity, only about a year and half, maybe less.

Fish are not humans. Humans on the average reach maturity (~= the ability to reproduce) in the early teens, full size in the late teens to early 20s. Fish reach maturity much earlier in their growth - which is important to them, as many do not live much past a very few breeding seasons in the wild. (Most fish in the wild never reach sexual maturity.) But, they never stop growing - after maturity the rate of growth slows markedly, but never stops fully - even old fish still grow in length.

HTH

[Pufferpunk]

I got mine at 2" & they were 6" within 2 years.

[liquid88]

I don't know for sure but I think it was a combination of different things that did it. The tank temp is 82 degrees, which may have raised her metabolism a little. Furthermore, shes been wormed and her food is soaked in vitamin solution about 4 times a week. Her diet consists of raw frozen shrimp, live snails(MTS, Pond and Ramshorn), frozen bloodworms, freeze dried krill, and occasionally sun dried gammarus.

[Nick]

Well, Shakespeare is at least 3 years old, and about 4". Jillybean is twoish, and about 2.5" Neither has ever been crowded at all by must best-guess standards - when total "inches of puffer" between a pair of cospecific tankmates reached 2/3 of the "inches" of GSP that could fit, they got an upgrade promptly.

I calculated puffer body weight and thus "total puffer mass" with some simplified estimations, and decided that since puffers are sensitive to stunting, upgrade must occur when the total puffer mass in the tank is half or less the recommended minimum, using the same estimations to "mass out" the single mature puffer - since I'm using proportions here, MOST of the errors in the estimations will actual cancel out mathematically, due to consistency of methodology. This post is already way too long and getting longer(I'm in rant mode tonight, dunno what's gotten into me) so I won't get into the exact method, but I will say it involves summing the volumes of cones and cylinders. I determined that for small-medium puffers(under 7" max size), when the combined length of all puffers is 2/3 of the what the tank could handle, bioload would be a bit under half a single puffer of that size and upgrade must occur.

This probably sounds insanely cautious to most people, but I hate the "upgrade as I go" game both for the risks of stunting and for the wallet burden. I thought I was done and comfortably into the realm of delicious excess by giving Shakespeare and Jilly a 72 bow with a 30 gallon sump, over 80 pounds of live rock and similar weight argonite sand as a nice marine FOWLR setup. But then my fiancé fell in love with puffers and decided if we're going to have a freaking HUGE saltwater tank in the house, a 180 or 220 doesn't take up all that much more floor space than the 72, and we can always add a 55 or 125 as a sump, so why not get a narrow lined puffer than grows to a footlong football? I guess our next apartment will have to be bottom-floor on a concrete slab so I can place a six foot long tank/stand/sump unit holding a total of over 300 gallons of water plus at least 160 pounds each rock and sand... preferably twice that on the rock.

In any case, I suspect GSPs are at least two, maybe more, different species, and that slightly different rates of growth and max size may occur. Also, there is always natural variation. The "max size" on a typically human is about 6.5' SOME get bigger, but not many, certainly less than 1%. And there are just as many humans around 5' tall as there are ones at six and a half feet. By far, however, most men in the USA are within a few inches of 5'10', and most women are within a few inches of 5'6'. Max sizes for fish tend to be the biggest ones that people think to measure, which means the BIG ones, similar to the six and a half foot humans. To moderate this, however, is that fish do not stop growing. So even if, say, most significant growth on a GSP happens before 4 years of age, and yours only gets to 5 inches by then... even if that's a bit on the small side, your puffer has at least another DECADE to catch up on that last inch and a half... and he probably WILL if you give him generous space and clean water.

TLDR: Humans vary in height and rate at which they reach adult height, fish do the same thing with max length, only you get the added benefit of them never quite stopping growing. This means you have many years of clean water and excessive space tol let your genetically runty puffer catch up with the fast-growers just fine over its long life.

[RTR]

All of which argues my point exactly - If you start with the optimum tank (including margins of safety) NOT the minimum tank, your fish-keeping life will be sooo much easier.

I am delighted that someone else has come to same conclusion independently - that it is far easier and cheaper to do it right to start off, rather than to upgrade several times during the first few years, with all the accompanying hassle. welcome to lazy fish-keepers club! It really is the best way to go.



Aside: PP babied those two GSPs shamelessly - they got the very best care and attention that any of us knew how to provide at the time. If there was anything at all amiss in their care, it was perhaps a tad of over-feeding, but we all also know and knew than how tricky it is to get equal portions into two con-specifics in a shared tank.

[Pufferpunk]

Yeah, one always had the bigger waistline:

[zombiefetus]

I had my GSP for about three years and he only grew to about 4".

[xmikebrock]

I have one in a 22 gallon by himself right now
I'm feeding him brine shrimp right now. Gonna start snails again soon. He probably one and a half inches when I got him almost a year and a hlf ago he was like one inch... Is there anything i could put in his food that will make him grow a little faster???

PP are Yours in sw yet? Jw

[bigfatfish]

Needs much more variety in his diet, most of which should be crunchy stuff. Maybe soak any frozen foods you give in vits.
PPs GSPs were rehomed a while ago - they were in marine conditions.

[Pufferpunk]

Brine shrimp is like cereal, compared to steak. Really crappy food for any fish. 99% water & basically non-nutritious.

[xmikebrock]

What about jumbo shrimp from thr grocery store

[Pufferpunk]

Perfect! Leave the shell on for their teeth. May have to cut them up a bit for smaller puffs.