But in most case, when you bring your puffer to the condition it suppose to in, they will pretty much eat anything you put in there, This is why I will try to show you how it can be done.
One of the most death causing reason for keeping puffer in aquarium is the owner do not provide them varieties of food. I have seen people only feed freeze dry shrimp to their puffer, I myself has done that in the past also. It may be ok for them to eat only that and be ok for awile, but it is definally not proper in the long run. Some may say that some puffer in the wild dont eat that many varieties of food either, but don't forget that the things they eat, (such as shrimp, crabs, etc) has feed on varieties of food befure they were eatten by the puffer. This is like gut loading the food you feed with varieties of things, which can be very difficult to done by man, even you are able to do it, it would take a lot of time and energy to do so, which is not so worthy in my opinion.
one method people do is to soak the food in liquid vitamins, I have done that also, which i think it is not too efficent also.
One thing most puffer keeper would agree is that puffers rarely take any processed food, they will only go after live, meaty seafood, worms, etc. This is not always true.
like my puffer, it is completly trained on eatting new life spectrum, which is good, because as many of you may know, NLS is a complete balanced food which will provide great health and condition to the fish. i feed all my fishes new life spectrum, like many people do, nls never gave us problems, even on the most easy bloated wild caught tropheus.
The method i use is no way of a innovation, a lot of people has done it before with many types or animals, i have done it on other reptiles like turtles, too.
The meatty food i used for my puffer was a whole shrimp, because my puffer is pretty big, it can swallow a whole shrimp in one bite. this should work well on other large species puffers too, but for smaller puffers, you may have to adjust accordingly.
First, butterfly the shrimp from the back with a knife, or you can buy those shrimp that is already butterflyed, but the trick is do not butterfly the shrimp all the way, just cut it half way on the back, this way the shrimp does not open too big, it will hold the pellets when it enter the water. When you feed it, try to get the puffer to the surface of the water, so it can eat it right quick. Try to not let the shrimp sit for too long, the pellets will fall out pretty easy sometimes. Most large species puffers do not chew too much, rather they swallow most of the food, so this method works pretty good for me, the pellets only fall out a few times.
then, press the the shrimp firmly, the pellets will "sink" into the shrimp meat a little, you should feel the round pellets from outside of the shrimp with finger, also kinda see through the pellets from outside. This helps to hold the pellets in the shrimp more tightly.
now close the cut a little bit, try to return the shrimp to the orginal shape as possible, so the puffer dont notice too much.
now you should be good to go, try to feed the puffer like this for a month or so. then try the pellets by itself, they should eat it. One important trick is to always get the puffer to the surface to feed it, this is important because you'd better use floating type of pellets, to better remove any uneatten pellets.
Some of you may wonder, how many pellets should feed. This should be different puffer by puffer, some puffers will stop eatting once they are full, i know when my puffer is done, because from the shape of the stomach and my puffer tend to play with food (chew it and spit it out) when it is full.
So here is the end of the story, please take a look at the video of my mbu feeding on NLS. (these are NLS EX Large fish pellets). I feed basically 50/50 with pellets, and meatty seafood, and once in awile some crabs, snails, crawfishs to trim the teeth of it.
Thank you all for reading this, I truly hope this would give some ideas to your feeding, and i hope this will work on your puffer too, i have only done it on my mbu, so i am not sure if others will have the results like mine, so if it does not, please forgive me, like i said, each puffer is so different than others.
here is the video on youtube (720P HD available):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT7K7JBJzlU
