The Puffer Forum

Sorry to hear that Nitrites are really toxic for puffers, especially when they have other things weakening them.

Sorry he didn't make it.

Thanks everyone, we were sad about pillow. I still can't get the nitrites down. I've done a large WC every day and I'm still reading 0.25 Nitrite. Anyone have any suggestions? Also, i know I'm not overfeeding because I hand feed my puffer shrimp and bloodworms one at a time but I still have a lot of algae in the tank and it's only a month old. I think I imported some with plants from another tank. Anyone have any good algae control measures?

Less light is the only one I can get to work.

i would agree wiht nick here algae remedy's can even sometimes make things worse

If you can get some bio-spira that would help to finish cycleing your tank. It took mine about 3 days after adding bio-spira.

Thanks for the advice. I think I'll go to 10 hrs light instead of 12, try that. It's all brown algae which I've heard is actually a diatome so hopefully it goes away. I'll see if I can get some bio-spira too.

We recently found that even with daily water changes in our QTs, existing salt water pH was significantly lower (7.8 ) than our replacement salt water (8.5). Depending on how you mix your replacement water It might be worthwhile testing your pH for both new and old water before a water change to see if a pH bounce is occurring during water changes. This could irritate already raw gills. This is probably not the cause of the problem but could aggravate the problem.

Thanks for the idea Fishfan(s). I have high PH water here though and it's always pretty steady (around 8.4) even just before my weekly change. Update, the brown "algae" is starting to take over, but I am hoping it's just new tank and will go away. I couldn't find bio-spira so I'm just letting things move along as they are now. If Blanket starts to appear sick at all I'll move him back to my 10g plant tank which is at similar salinity but is an established tank. Otherwise I've stopped daily WC's and am checking nitrite daily. (Staying constant at 0.25.) Hopefully it'll finish cycling soon, but Blanket seems fine, he ate 2 snails and a bunch of PE Mysis with gusto an hour ago.