The Puffer Forum

RTR wrote: I still think that I over-feed. But I am learning...

i have to say if you thing you are still overfeeding then i know i am by a mile...so i am very cautious now...

i have a 45 pound dog, he gets 3 cups of his kibble every day, once a day, he is very active runs around all crazy and stuff and he is in perfect health...

baby fahaka probably weighs 1-2 ounces...maybe three, swims all over the 180 g tank.... i feed him 1 maybe 2 little pinches of mussel and by pinch i mean little not even the size of his eye...

Big Achemd i would feed 3-4 mussels every 4 or 5 days and would take out whatever he did not eat in a 5 hour period, i would throw them around all over his tank to try and make him hunt for them... still think that was to much as i read and learn more.... i should have weighed him when he passed hmm.....

going to try a small pea with out the husk tonight... will see how that goes...

i do agree companies want to make you feed and buy stuff...heck i was in the food service for over 24 years...you bet i used key words to make you order desserts, drinks, app.... etc... no different in this situation... only difference now, i can read thru the crap.....

thanks RTR, i really do appreciate your insight and advice....

have a good day...

Advertising -in the broadest sense - is not quite a science yet, but it gets closer all the time. Very few if any for-profit firms can do without it and even fer not-for-profit organization can survive without it. It has grown and developed because it works. We know we are being hooked, but we still cannot totally ignore it. It is a non-trivial part of our culture and our lives. The best we can hope for is at the least, to use critical judgement on the product evaluation of the products and techniques we accept and use. It is no longer just death and taxes which are inevitable. It is now advertising, death, and taxes. Critical evaluation is still a positive survival trait - even more than it was in the past.

so i am a welder fabricator and while i am welding i always have thoughts....

if we feed puffers, in my case SW PEI Mussles and green lip mussels (for achmed, little guy cant quite get thru the shell) and that was his main diet then he would have gotten the nutrients of mostly SW variety, which if he is a freshwater fish, that would be the extreme opposite of his diet needs. Would that be a correct assumption?

so if that is the case then i was giving him the wrong diet from the get go excluding his early years when he was only able to go thru mystery snails that i would raise and feed them..

I know there are freshwater mussels and clams, trying to get them is a hard thing to do... but in theory that would be probably the best diet along with the snails and some sort of alge slash veggies...

i guess the question is for RTR or anyone who really knows water compostion, is the mineral, vitamin content of SW versus FW that feeding a FW fish a high diet of SW shellfish bad overall?

We used to have another metal worker here and very active, his web name was Steel Geek. He knew or new of the work of a former neighbor mine here, Bill Moran, whose work he had studied. My neighbor was a bladesmith and rather well known - convoys of stretch limos for Arab princes and their own and US security folk infested the neighborhood all too often. Bill redeveloped th process for Damasus Steel blades. He did more hammering than welding, but obviously did both. He was quite a character.

I personally have not had no issues with freshwater/saltwater foods for puffers, but I have known many folk here who have. I tend to keep the fishes diet to their native water source, other than F-8s, who got mostly FW snails (home reared) with other FW foods as treats. Personally I have has few SW puffers, and they got marine shellfish from the grocery fish department for their diets, plus dried algae from the LFS. I am relatively near two large metropolitan areas where we go with some regularity. Getting puffer or other specialized foods for my fish has not been an issue.

fair enough, i will keep the trend to snails and making their diet what i want for little fahaka and other stuff...

i work on structural steel, i have work on the steel for lambeu field, Mall of America, numerous power plants duct work, really big stuff.... the MoMo building in Chi was fun, huge beams in that one... lots of fun...

If you live and work in a metro area, you should have good available human and fish foods. It may take a bit of exploration to start with, but it usually is not too bad. It is the folk from smaller towns with no major cities in easy reach who have the biggest issues with food sources.