The Puffer Forum

No troll poll, kind of a semi-serious poll actually.

I have owned cichlids for years and Ive had lame ones that had zero personality and Ive had some exceptional ones. My favorites have had to be a Midas that I had some years back and now my Pearsei. Recently I thought it would be cool to get some bichir in the tanks. There were tons of people talking about them being so cool... well they really are not. They fall into the zero personality category. So with a new puffer on the way I was actually kind of curious if people had any real experience and compared the two as to personality. Like I said all my experience has been cichlids so thats the way I voted. Another cichlid owner could not decide so that tells me a lot about the puffer personality.

It's got to be Puffer, their intelligence blows me away

I've been keeping fresh, brackish and salt water species for more than 30 yrs and voted for puffers without any hesitation. There is only one species which can be compared with puffers i.e. triggers.

Additionally, puffers have talents (communication, art, etc) and may be only fish species which has culture (culture is something partially related with art) .
Please check.
http://www.geekosystem.com/underwater-crop-circle/
Regards,

Cichlids are a moderately large FW family with very few BW fish on the edges. Puffers are a moderately small and very highly specialized marine family with unique genetic adaptaions with relatiely adaptable members in marine waters worldwide, primarily but not exclusively in the tropics, and with non-trivial numbers which have adapted to BW and FW environments.

The Cichlids have highly varied breeding techniques sufficient to make them effectively live in an inexhaustible variety of niches. They are in general highly "intelligent" and many are highly adapted but others are also strongly adaptable. Puffers, although a much smaller family, exhibit equal or greater adaptability, personality, and intelligence. The puffers have unique nuclear genes, and from this have become a non-trivial group for the study of genetic function.

To the scientist today, the puffers are far more valuable than the Cichlids, and this is likely to be a long lead in such sweepstakes.

For the hobbyists, both families have high-personality members who make superb, if somewhat demanding pets. To me it is a toss-up. Both families offer plenty of material for hobbyists, but my personal feelings are that hobbyists who think that all tanks should be "communities" do the fish a severe disservice when they force puffers into such situations, just as they do with many Cichlids, but the case is far stronger for puffers to be mixed w/other fish only by the most experience hobbyists. Puffers IMHO require more care and species-specific housing and handling than do Cichlids generally.

We will always have hobbyists - likely a high majority of them - who grossly abuse fish of all types at the level of strongly detrimental housing and care. There is no solution for that but education, and still a likely large majority will always abuse fish and other pets as well.

FWIW, YMMV.

+1 to RTR, my daughter's community tank makes me very uncomfortable. All the fish should get on, we chose them carefully,and the tank is set up so there's lots of 'areas', but I would much prefer it if she just stuck to one specific shoaling species. Guppies would be my choice, I love their sheer variety and beauty, but it's not my tank. I do, however, insist that she follows the same cleaning regime as me; at least the tank is spotless.

Lol I'd love a huge tank just for a school of fish, but I couldn't stick with one species and I'd rather have a puff in it lol

Oh me too, Piggy wins hands down in this house. Well, as far as I'm concerned anyway

Having watched a Fahaka for a while at the fish store and interacting with it, I do not doubt the personality of the puffer. But like I said all I have to go by is my cichlids Ive raised so far and its pretty hard to beat. My midas that I had years ago would not 'glass bang' at all. He was super friendly until he was ready to mate, then if I stuck my hand in the tank to clean he would attack. I had to wear one of those long cleaning gloves or else I would have got all bit up! Once his mating frenzy was over it was no issue to stick my hand in the water. I miss that fish a lot.

My Pearsei is very inquisitive and watches what I do all the time. Our dining room is right next to the fish tank (living room) and one evening when we had friends over, he spent all of dinnertime at the side closest to us and just watched us eat. Like a little dog waiting for table scraps.

So it will be interesting to compare these two fish and see if I would change my vote....

Adult Fahakas could remove a finger. I used stainless steel mesh gloves over heavy dry-box gloves and still got seriously bruised. I reset the tanks to be able to insert double eggcrate barries so one-half the tank could be cleaned with the in the opposite end. Never trust big puffers. The fingers you save may be your own.

One of my personal favorite fish tanks was a 6x2x2 tank with a school of SAPs, strong circular current, with a densely planed "spine" down the center stopping shy of each end. Their snails were added to the planted area during the dark cycle to give the SAPs "work". Endlessly fascinating. The SAPs are my second favorite puffers in numbers I have kept, after F-8s. The system had two veggie filters, with offset light cycles to keep oxygenation up at least a bit 24/7. The secondary veggie filters raised Val for trade-in.

RTR wrote:Never trust big puffers. The fingers you save may be your own.

Ha! This is a sig worthy quote!!!

Darn, I've already got a RTR quote in my siggy!

I actually put it there to remind myself! Don't go to the pet store, buy a fish, and not have a tank for it...which I have done

DMD123, Now that you have a puffer in your collection, what's your vote?

Gah, I should have nabbed that quote

Although my Figure 8 is probably my favorite fish the one with the most personality has to be my mudskipper Periophthalmus barbarus; seriously bold with plenty of attitude