Tetractenous hamiltoni (Common Toadfish)

[Bonhilda]

Hello,

About 6 weeks ago I got a Tetractenous hamiltoni (Common Toadfish). It stopped eating after about a week or two and I was very concerned, but after several weeks of not eating I tried soaking its food in garlic and that worked amazingly well! So now it is eating again and seems reasonably happy.

I only just found out which species of puffer it was... I had thought that it might have been Tetraodon nigroviridis or Tetraodon fluviatilis, so I am relieved to find out it's not, since I have some other brackish water fish in the tank as well. However, I am really concerned to discover that this is a schooling species! Is it going to be really unhappy without any other fish of the same species? If so, what should I do? My tank is at maximum capacity and I don't know if there are any people in my area who could take any of my brackish fish. I don't have space to get a bigger tank. Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated; I really don't want my fish to be sad.

Thanks in advance!

[Pufferpunk]

Can you please post a pic of your fish for proper ID? What size is the tank & who is he living with?
I wouldn't' be keeping that puffer with any other fish!

[Bonhilda]

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/29 ... dfish.jpg/

The tank is 120 litres and there are also 2x Silver Scats (Selenotoca multifasciata) and 7x Pacific Blue-Eyes (Pseudomugil signifer).

[Bonhilda]

So does no one have any advice?

[Bonhilda]

Also, I've heard people talk about toys, such as ping pong balls. I am a bit concerned about placing plastic items in the tank that are not specifically manufactured for use in aquariums. I know someone who bought some plastic plants that leached toxic chemicals into her tank and killed all of her fish! Does anyone know if there is somewhere online to buy fish toys that are safe to put in aquaria?

I also wondered about putting some cuttlefish in there for my puffer to chew on, but again I wasn't sure if it was safe... How do I know it hasn't been somehow chemically treated?

[j_wishbone]

your hamiltoni should be ok on its own...

and yes they can get a bit grumpy and take a swipe at your other fish..

[RTR]

As scats are among the messiest fish in captivity, your toadfish should be alone in its 120L tank, Your tank is too small for even one Silver Scat - are you aware that they grow to a foot in length and can live up to 20 years?

What specific gravity are you planning to use for the toadfish?

Do you have liquid test kits?

[Bonhilda]

your hamiltoni should be ok on its own...

and yes they can get a bit grumpy and take a swipe at your other fish..

Hmm well so far it hasn't shown any sign of aggression towards the other fish. It is around 10cm and so are the Scats, but the Pacific Blue-Eyes are only about 4-5cm and are still looking fat and happy and none of them have gone missing or anything. I have heard that Pufferfish can be unpredictable and become aggressive all of a sudden after a long period of being a good community fish...

As scats are among the messiest fish in captivity, your toadfish should be alone in its 120L tank, Your tank is too small for even one Silver Scat - are you aware that they grow to a foot in length and can live up to 20 years?

What specific gravity are you planning to use for the toadfish?

Do you have liquid test kits?

Oh dear... I just found out that my local store has also sold me two Discus for my 120 litre freshwater tank, when they need to be kept in schools of six in a much larger size tank. I am not terribly impressed to learn these things after the fact, especially since I tend to try and plan carefully and ask a lot of questions prior to purchasing fish.

About six months ago, I read that Scats get to a maximum size of 20cm (1 foot = 30cm), and I mentioned that to the local shop, and they seemed unconcerned and said they probably won't end up getting to that size in my tank, and that if they did, I might just need to get a bigger tank! I am pretty upset by that suggestion, since I do not have space for that and would have thought it might have been worth mentioning to me before I purchased the fish from them after they recommended it to me for my brackish set up!

I am trying to keep the tank at a specific gravity of between 1.010 and 1.018. I think it's about 1.018 at the moment, though I'm not sure if my hydrometer is accurate.

Yes, my test kits are liquids.

Do any of you ever wonder if fish are happy in captivity? I mean, I can tell the difference between a fish that is healthy and one that is distressed, but I think there's a big difference between living and thriving. I know many fish are very social, and some communicate using clicking and buzzing noises, and I wonder how much impact the noise of the aquarium pump would have on their ability to do this. I imagine they would be somewhat adaptive and that some species would cope better than others. It pains me to think that my fish might be bored and depressed... It's a big price to pay to be guaranteed regular food and freedom from predation.

[bertie 83]

Fish are happy to live with us if we feed them, give them suitable exercise grounds and maintain their home to a high standard. Never buy on impulse or on what a person at the store tells you, they are often misinformed. Always take your time and research research research.

[RTR]

The biggest issue in keeping fish in captivity for me is the massive lack of knowledge offered by pet shop personnel. If fish are properly house, fed, and maintained, they will live to high multiples of the average lifespan of their wild counterparts and will reach or exceed the size thy will achieve in the wild. For store staff to tell a potential owner that they will not grow to full size is to me a bold confession that the folks there do not know how to keep fish adequately. Stunting is never beneficial.

If I cannot adequately house and care for a fish, I will not attempt to keep it in captivity. More than a third of my tanks at this moment house fish which are 20 or more years old. You can tell good fishkeepers when you visit because their fish and tanks are generally stable for years to decades. Some species may get traded off, and some tanks are given away from lack of interest and boredom, but core populations do tend to last and last to high multiples of their wild life expectancy. Last week I lost a male mbuna which was over 26 years old. I do have a stunted goldfish who is not kept in ideal conditions- it is just above room temperature year-round (the room is low 70sF constantly, the tan 2-4 degrees warmer from lights and filters. It is in its upper 20s and likely will outlive me. I have some African catfish the same age range that will definitely outlive me. Thank goodness I don't have and Clown Loaches - they are like big parrots, they can outlive people.

Everybody goes through learning stages to keep any sort of pet. I have certainly killed my share of fish in my time, but I have also returned an awful lot of fish and plants to the hobby. I also try to share some of what I have learned about keeping fish with others who are just starting out in the hobby, quite likely from guilt over all the fish I have harmed by lack of knowledge - my first puffers BTW were GSPs, which I bought to eat the excess snails harvested from my Cichlid fry rearing tanks. I kept 4 of them in too small a tank in FW for almost 10 years before I traded them off to a friend who could house them better. They did not grow at all for me. That was over 40 years ago. I do know better now, but I still feel guilty.

[Bonhilda]

Thank you for your responses.

Wow, I did not know Clown Loaches lived for that long! How did you learn so much about fish to be able to care for them so well and to avoid selecting species that are inappropriate for the aquariums you have? Where is the best place to get information?

The store I go to is not a pet store, it is specifically a fish store. I told them that I wanted a pufferfish that wouldn't grow too big for my tank and wouldn't be aggressive towards the other fish in my tank. I kept following up for nearly two years before they finally got one in for me. Then they didn't even know what kind it was... When it stopped eating they had to phone the supplier to ask what species it was, and they narrowed it down to one of the two Tetractenous species, which made it easy for me to figure out. By that time I'd already had it for about a month. Then I had a lot of difficulty in finding much information about this fish. I still don't know how important schooling is for them and whether it will cause depression to be without conspecifics. I really don't know what to do about my puffer, my scats or my discus! I feel like I've let them all down terribly!

[RTR]

I am a grumpy old man who has been keeping fish >>60 years now. If you don't learn something in that time, you have a real problem.

FYI, my wife required a pre-nup before she would marry me - That I would not keep snakes and would not allow our kids to do so. I can and have lived with that. I had a dozen tank at that time... I got rid of a Boa and kept the fish. I have two fish rooms, only one in use. at the moment. I got my first puffers back in the 1970s. I did not keep them very well - they were not well know back then.

[Bonhilda]

So I had another look at my book Brackish-Water Fishes edited by Neale Monks, and now I can see why it's only been recently that I've become aware of the size issue with my scats. It says "Selenotoca multifasciata typically reaches lengths of only 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) in captivity". However, most online sources I've come across suggest that they grow over 30 cm, including this article ( http://www.tfhmagazine.com/details/arti ... rticle.htm ) by the same author, which claims that they will get to 38 cm and will usually reach 15-20 cm within a year or two of purchase.

I just checked mine again, and although they're hard to measure, I think they're about 12 cm, even though I've had them for over 3 years now. Since their spots are definitely smaller than their eyes, I am fairly certain they are Selenotoca multifasciata and not Selenotoca papuensis. Perhaps mine are stunted, since they were essentially kept in fresh water until I got my pufferfish, and then because of the puffer not eating, the store finally bothered to tell me that using the rift lake salt they'd recommended to me at the dose indicated on the packaging would not make the water brackish. They look fat to me though, so they can't be too stunted...

Either way, it really does sound like I probably need to find the scats a new home at some point?

Also, I recently bought a book about discus, and it says that they're really vulnerable to vibrations, so the tank should not be kept in an area of the house where there is a lot of traffic, which is just great, since that is exactly where my tank is, and I don't really have space to put it anywhere else. I haven't noticed that they seem too stressed or anything though.

I am feeling pretty down about all this now... It makes me want to give up on keeping fish altogether. I don't know what to do! If I were to persist with this hobby, how can I ensure that any fish I get in future will actually be suitable? I thought I'd already ensured this with the discus, scats and puffer, but obviously not. I want to keep something more exciting that just a school of neon tetras.

[bertie 83]

Don't give up, if we don't make mistakes we don't learn. It's when you don't learn from your mistakes you have a problem. You have us here if you need any info, not just on puffers. People here have knowledge on all sorts of fish.