The Puffer Forum

thanks so much.
hes getting less and less shy by the day. i just love his personality haha!
where would i find clams and hard shell food for him (besides snails)? all the pet stores dont really sell anything like that? supermarket maybe? hmmm

Go for supermarket, fishmongers etc.... as long as it's fresh or frozen fresh it should be fine.

one of my local fish stores even sells cockle that is packaged for human consumption --

my name is mike wrote:one of my local fish stores even sells cockle that is packaged for human consumption --

thats crazy but in a real cool way haha!
i just bought some clams...i will see how they do with him. thanks again!

if you leave the "meat" attached to the shell, he will scrape his teeth against the shell, helping to keep it worn

Practically all the food my fish get is either from the grocery store or the garden. The exception is flake, obviously, but that's not a big thing in this household... a small tub of Spirulina flake lasts about two years! Anyway, virtually any seafood raw or cooked should work. But at the moment the favoured food among my puffers are woodlice (terrestrial isopods). They are very crunchy, which is a good thing, and also very common (in England, anyway). You can find them under any rock or bit of wood outdoors. Obviously you need to collect them from somewhere clean and not sprayed with poisons and whatnot. Basically an organic garden or "the wild".

Also use tinned peas; there's some good evidence puffers eat significant amounts of green foods in the wild, and many specimens in captivity seem to enjoy tinned peas and algae wafers. Oddly, one of my SAPs loves peas, but the other two don't. So it isn't a "by species" thing as far as I can tell.

yah i heard about peas. i will try with my GSP. i know goldfish really love peas and its really good for them.
the clams i got are still in their shells. i figured it be a good idea for him to work for his food(assuming its a male). i have 4 rabbits at home and they say to get them to work for some of their food because their teeth grow their whole lives. i know rabbits and fish arnt the same haha!
i believe we do have wood lice here however im sure the winter kills them all off. and its the season for that (im from canada...its okay u can laugh at my misfortune)

neale, have you had success with figure 8's taking peas ? -- i feed them to my goldfish all the time but never thought to drop them in the puff tanks

also, my snails eat nothing but algae, so are my puffs getting enough veggies that way?

F8's should take em, my sadly demised one would even take flake others have took flake also. Very unfussy eaters. It's worth trying it'll probably be successful.

nice, thanks for the tips

Don't have Figure-8 puffers, so can't comment on what they like. But some SAPs certainly eat peas. Also algae wafers, very occasionally.

By themselves snails probably aren't a perfect source of "greens" but they're better than nothing. Mussels are usually very good, because they have a stomach that is normally filled with marine algae. A valuable source of minerals and vitamins. Almost all predatory animals depend to some extent on eating the "chyme" (as this undigested plant matter is called) as a source of vitamins. Even cats, which are sometimes called perfect carnivores because they rarely eat plant material. Watch a cat eat a bird or mouse: it eats the guts and liver first, and may even leave behind the meaty parts we'd consider valuable.

Cheers, Neale

interesting insight - helpful as always - thanks neale

my cat eats timothy hay.

My GSP Shakespeare LOVES peas. His smaller tank mate Jillybean is only down for maybe half of one very occasionally.

For the record Clooney loved peas too