First I wanted to say that researching this forum for a few months gave me a lot of information and a lot of direction on starting up our hobby. We have taken the Marine FOWLR plunge head first. I have kept freshwater tanks (afraid to take on saltwater because of the advice of others on how difficult they are to maintain) in the past but after researching a lot and spending a lot of time at a few LFS's I have come to be fascinated by it and so far I am really enjoying it.
My wife got me back into the hobby after so many years because she has a tank in her office with a S&S Puffer named FIN, an Undulated Trigger named Smith, & Wesson, a Lagoon Trigger as well as a Snowflake Eel whose name escapes me. Anyways, we set out to create a FOWLR with a Arothron Hispidus puffer and after cycling our tank we waited until our LFS had a small one (2-3 inches) in stock.
After searching around and popping in and out often looking at their new stock we noticed a puffer that caught our attention because we had never seen it before. The LFS fish room associate let us know that it was a Mappa puffer and that since it was young it didn't have it's full coloration (a question I asked after researching MAPPA's and looking at it's markings...) it would soon grow and change into a puffer slightly larger than a S&S. We thought that this was acceptable and decided we would let the Mappa grow out in our tank and purchase a larger tank in about a year.
SO... we took it home and I watched it for several hours as it drip acclimated and something about the pattern bothered me. I looked at it and recalled what the associate at the LFS said and it just didn't seem right. The "camoflouge" brown and tan background with black dots all over the surface didn't match the white backround and black/brown spots of a Mappa puffer images I was seeing all over the internet but I couldn't find another species online that matched either. Our puffer is, as many of you educated puffer keepers know, NOT an Arothron Mappa puffer, it is an Arothron Stellatus or "Starry" puffer... You know, the one that you need to keep in the ocean. You know, the one that they say hobbyists shouldn't attempt to keep. You know, the kind of commitment that you don't take on for your first marine aquarium.
So, after this new information I researched the heck out of the Starry puffer on this forum, on the internet as well as through several LFS's and LDFS's (long distance) and we have decided to keep in a good home (with a much larger tank in the near future) as opposed to bringing it back to the LFS and wondering what will happen to it.
I look forward to contributing here and thank you (a lot of you) so much for sharing all the information that you have shared which has helped us take on this hobby as well as our starry puffer family member.
Here is the photo of our puffer, named "GEORGE" (after George Washington with respect to the Stars in the Stars & Stripes Flag of the United States).
![[welcome]](./images/smilies/welcome.gif "welcome")
But yes, a dedicated room is in the works for filtration and housing a monster tank build.