The Puffer Forum

So I have been to three different places to find earthworms / red wigglers and noone has them right now.
Stopped by the pet store and they only thing I found was meal worms. Saw an old post that RTR said he used to feed them to his puffers when they were young.
Tried that only one problem they float He wont come to the top. Chills down at the bottom or in the middle when he does decide to swim.

So taking those back today and will try and find some earthworms for him to try. At this rate I might just go dig a few up out back of the house if I can find some.

A damp cloth or newspaper on the surface of the ground will bring worms up to the surface, also check under rocks. Mealworms tend to be too fatty for puffers, their skins are hard/impossible for them to digest also

Mealworms with hardened bodies are not good foods for puffers. When I used mealworms, they were the young one, just hatched out and with relatively soft, generally white "skin". Otherwise they are not the best food as the puffers cannot easily segregate the indigestible hard "skin" from the internal mass if that life stage. At that time we were also breeding cage birds, so I bred several plastic bins of mealworms, selecting out the newly hatched white (soft-skinned) ones for feeding fish. The hard-skinned ones were for the birds. Shop-purchased containers of mealworms are likely too hard to be effective or desirable puffer food. Breeding them is too much trouble for a single puffer - you would get many hard mealworms which are not god puffer with only a few soft ones - it is only a matter of hours after hatching that the "skin" hardens.

HTH

Walmart has earthworms in their fishing dept.

bertie 83 wrote:A damp cloth or newspaper on the surface of the ground will bring worms up to the surface, also check under rocks. Mealworms tend to be too fatty for puffers, their skins are hard/impossible for them to digest also

I will give that a shot tonight.

RTR wrote:Mealworms with hardened bodies are not good foods for puffers. When I used mealworms, they were the young one, just hatched out and with relatively soft, generally white "skin". Otherwise they are not the best food as the puffers cannot easily segregate the indigestible hard "skin" from the internal mass if that life stage. At that time we were also breeding cage birds, so I bred several plastic bins of mealworms, selecting out the newly hatched white (soft-skinned) ones for feeding fish. The hard-skinned ones were for the birds. Shop-purchased containers of mealworms are likely too hard to be effective or desirable puffer food. Breeding them is too much trouble for a single puffer - you would get many hard mealworms which are not god puffer with only a few soft ones - it is only a matter of hours after hatching that the "skin" hardens.

HTH

I bought the white meal worms that don’t have a hard shell yet. But they float so my puffer wants nothing to do with them.

Pufferpunk wrote:Walmart has earthworms in their fishing dept.

Tried two different Wal-Mart’s and both of them had Frozen rock hard worms all dead.

Stupid Walmart!

Pufferpunk wrote:Stupid Walmart!

Agreed

Well took Bertie83 advice found a couple worms in the yard and washed them off.

Dexter wanted nothing to do with them.
Just sat half way buried and looked at me.
I honestly think if he could laugh at me he would "Stupid human"

Well that makes clams, krill, shrimp, worms, white meal worms, crayfish and snails in which he wants nothing to do with them.

I am wondering if he doesn't want to eat because of the chiclids.
My next thing would be removing them completely which would suck.
But go back to just him being in the tank

Guess there's only one way to find out...

I would recommend that anyway, if they are picking at him it will eventually be that way soon, but with shredded cichlids. If you wish to keep something else with him try something placid and fast like rasporas or danios. Although they will also likely disappear

bertie 83 wrote:I would recommend that anyway, if they are picking at him it will eventually be that way soon, but with shredded cichlids. If you wish to keep something else with him try something placid and fast like rasporas or danios. Although they will also likely disappear

In the past if we had a fish that he didnt like inside the tank he would usually just crush it and that was it.
He has allowed the cichlids for sometime now. I will removed them sometime this weekend hate to do that because I have a 210gallon with just the fahaka in it.

Maybe the cichlids front him down and he does not like that, whereas other fish might not. Maybe try some dither fish once the cichlids are removed, it will go one way or the other

Tripp: Get and learn to use some good forceps to hold food item for the puffer. Then the food's buoyancy doesn't matter.

HTH

So cichlids have been removed and he still didnt do much.
So tonight we tube fed him. That perked him up for sure....

How did that go? What foods did you get into him? Added vitamins?

How did that go? What foods did you get into him? Added vitamins?