The Puffer Forum

Yes, welcome aboard and thanks for dropping in! I'd like to add my name to the list of folks "bowing humbly" at your obvious love of and dedication to the hobby. I'm afraid that I will never have the time or money to do a project like yours, but I can certainly admire your creation. :3*:

I kept about eight mature individuals per 240-gallon tank.

Btw, I had one Mbu puffer, and it would be bigger problem to try to breed them, considering their mature size, then relatively small fahakas

How did you handle water maintanence and filtration for that many Fahaka's in a 240? That's a very large Bio-load for a tank that size. Do you still have them?

MP

Presently I don't have fahakas, but it's not connected with filtration

As my aquarium room is too big to not to automate any work in, my filtration techniques are simplistic. For fahakas, for instance, I used a set of sponges with three or four powerheads. Water changes - once or twice a week, about 30% of volume.

Moreover. I'm not an apologist of the primitive techniques in any way, but sometimes you can get better results without thoughtful advices. I confess that in winter I used tap water for water changes for selected tanks (fahakas' included), and this tap water was really cold (one can't stand several seconds with a hand plunged) and chlorinated; I've already mentioned the volume of the water change and you can imagine that the temperature in aquariums dropped from 25 to 15 C or so within a quarter of an hour, so what? no problems were discovered. This was quite empirical and personal approach, not to be followed.

P. S. Sorry for any my errors in English.

Funny you mention that. Yesterday, while doing an 80% water change on my 125g tank, I noticed that the fish didn't look well at all. I reached in to poke at one of the fish in there & realized that my almost full tank was ice cold! I quickly filled the rest w/only hot water, then drained the tank a few inches & filled w/more hot water, getting it back to 78. Hubby said our cold water here is probably <60F. The fish all looked stressed--some even dead--but the least stressed-looking fish was Filbert, the fahaka. BTW, no fish actually died from this horrible frigid mistake. All are fine a day later.

Wow, that's a lot of tanks and a lot of fish! What an experience.

Isn't it funny how puffers can be so sensitive to a lot of things but then other things they are very adaptable?

When I was gone for about a week a few weeks ago, my GSP tanks heater was unplugged. The temp dropped down to the low 60's for several days. I just plugged the heater back in and let the temp slowly rise back up. I didn't want to further stress them with a sudden temp change. The next day they were happy as clams again!

I'm always afraid I'll forget to plug-in the heaters after water changes & I'm trying to develop some reminder to plug them once the tank is filled (small post-it notes? water change checklist?). Nice to hear it wouldn't be a disaster if/when I forget.

Being a bit gadget-happy, I use plug strips for all my tanks. One strip has the things which should be off while wotking in the tank - heaters, pumps, filters, etc. The other strip has lights, reservoir pumps, etc which I want 'on' while working in the tank. Close tank back up when done, glance at the strips to confim that both idiot lights are 'on'. Job done.

Good idea! I use the strips too, but don't have them dedicated this way. One less checklist !

That reason is part of why I'm switching over to the titanium heaters, I don't have to worry about turning them off and them shattering if I take the water level too low during a change (or me bumping it and shattering it and giving myself a shock).

EboJager heaters work the same way.