vegetarian puffer

[side19]

ok, so after a trip to the lfs looking for a panda garra i happened upon a tank with 3 decent size SAPs in it. well i promptly informed my friend josh, and the next day he was walking home with two of them, and i was walking home with the other one (he didn't have the money or room for all 3, so i saved the last one as the lfs didn't know what do do with them and was feeding them flake food and keeping them in a tank with ruby scats and a rather aggressive GSP). well once home i put him in my recently vacated 20 gallon (finally found a temp home for the fish from that tank, my high school bio teacher took them off my hands until next summer when i can set up my new 55!) and noticed some very odd behavior. he's acting normal as far as a puffer goes but not as far as eating. he took to frozen mysis and brine shrimp right away, but when i plopped a bunch of live snails in, he just left them alone and started munching on plants. i first thought he was going after a snail on the leaf, but then saw him munching on the stalk of an anubias which clearly had no snails on it! i know the pedia says they will destroy plants hunting for snails, but he was straight up just eating the plants! my friend said his have been eating snails like little pigs, so its clearly not like the whole batch as a bunch of vegetarians. do i just have a weird puffer? is there anything i can do to get him to eat snails as they're all i can get right now for crunchy stuff so his teeth won't grow too fast? i always get the weird puffers

[purplecandle]

I do not have any live plants (One day I will get brave enough to do that)

But, what I have learned from other people on this forum is that sometimes puffers just munch on plants..because they can!

I find this video kind of funny....the puffer is like "so what I chewed up these plants. Got those blood worms?"

It is JoseDepacos's video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09WITMZ1 ... re=related

[side19]

well that just solved two mysteries. i now know what happened to my java fern, and all this time i was blaming the old ottos instead of my f8 ra. why must i love destructive fish so much

[Troender]

SAPs can occationally eat green stuff. The only person I know of, who has been able to keep SAPs without doing dentistry on them, had SAPs that ate pleco tablets.

[Flutter]

Ours munched on plants and loved algae wafers.

[side19]

ok. so do you think i should try feeding it algae wafers to help trim his teeth? also i looked up the price and info on finquel and it said it expires after a few days. is this true? that means each bottle will be a single use if you only clip them about every 6 months, and at 27 USD a bottle that's a little extreme. is there anyway i can get the little guy to start eating the snails? i'm going to try and get some raw shell on shrimp the next time i go to the local grocery store or maybe some clams, do you think he'll take a liking to either of those?

[Troender]

When it comes to trimming the teeth with algae wafers, I've only heard of this single person, so I can't say it will work. I am not quite sure what will give a balanced diet for a SAP either. I only know that they can take green stuff. What's right when it comes to how much of it they can have in their food, I don't know.

[xrayjeeper83]

algae wafers wont trim teeth, they are to soft

[sao870]

My gsp's eat algae wafers every now and then................

[RTR]

All puffers consume some plant materials. For FW puffers that is normally part of collecting snails from FW plants or algae (just as plecos and other wood and algae grazers get copepods and small worm type critters in the wild while grazing their food of choice). Some SW puffers will consume a non-trivial amount of plant materials, and that is much less common in FW and BW puffers.

It is not at all rare to have to teach puffers to eat our cultured FW snails. Just crack or crush a smallel snail with forceps in the tank with the puffer - they learn fast. But you do need to scale the sail size to the individual puffer, or crush any larger ones.

IME, it takes a basically snail diet to control a SAPs incisor plates.

HTH