The Puffer Forum

Look for used tanks on forums in your area and in the newspaper and stuff. Also check yard sales and anything else you can think of.

Getting that tank upgraded is extremely important. Stunting fish is extremely easy to do, and it's not very nice/fair to the fish. When a fish is stunted it stops growing externally but its insides continue to grow, and it will kill it.

I also second the vote to add more tall stuff. You want plenty of broken up lines of sight, especially with 2 GSPs in such a small tank.

Ok, thanks, I will upgrade the tank as fast as I can! The problem is just in my area aren't many people who have or sell an aquarium. However I will probably go into the store and check these out.

Ok, I changed some of the decor. I think it looks better now. As you told me I added a cave behind this stone "tunnel".

*Don't wonder, I just put a pillow behind the aquarium in order to have a better look at it. Because it is in the room, not at a wall.

The commonest error in puffer-keeping after overfeeding is stunting by inadequate tank size. IMHO and IME, "moving a fish up in tank size as it needs it" is 100% guarantee of stunted fish.

Yes, I have heard of that. I am already planning to get a 240 litre aquarium in the beginning of next year!

A good source for used tanks in Germany is quoka.de but only buy a used tank if you know how to at least somewhat determine its quality (or if you can cut them apart and glue them together yourself in the case of big tanks).

For marine systems it depends a lot on what you want to do. It's no problem to modify a freshwater setup to be able to keep two puffers and soft corals without great costs. I usually only changed the bulbs to one white and one blue and added much more current with regard to the technical installations, larger tanks also get a hang on skimmer.

If you want a reef tank with sps and lps corals, this will however cost much more for 240 l than what you plan.

In my experience Java fern will die slowly in salinities higher than 1.006-7 and even in the 1.003 gange it's more surviving than thriving. This stuff grows like weed in one of my freshwater tanks and I have to throw away a lot of it every few weeks, so I tried quite often to adapt it to lower end brackish water.

Cryptocoryne ciliata is a plant that can endure lower end brackish salinities, but it's not very easy to cultivate, so in the long run IMO the easiest and most reliable way to a good looking tank with GSPs (without plastic stuff) is to go marine and grow easy soft corals (I simply throw everything I have to cut off in larger systems into such tanks and wait to see what grows).

The entire reason I got into keeping reef tanks is because I tried corals with my GSPs. They really wrecked havoc with them. So the GSPs went (the 55g wasn't big enough for the 2 6" adults) & now I have 2 stunning reef tanks!

Mine only destroy some sps and lps, a diversity of soft corals (Shrooms, various Sinularia spp., Nephthea "trees"), which likely don't taste very well, is totally left alone after an intinal testing bite.

After they went after the zoanthids, they left the tank.