The Puffer Forum

Thanks! Glad you like it. You should get some and join the forum.

Pics from today...



This sand was smooth after the water change the other day. They dug it all up for egg-laying in a matter of hours.






Nerite snail... I added a couple drops of Prime to keep things safe for the snail, since it can't tolerate everything that the triops can.


"I wanna lay eggs here!" "No, I was here first!"

Wow they really grew up and became quite colorful! Congrats!!

Thanks, J-P!

I'm getting excited about my summer of triops. I'm hoping to get some exotic eggs from AquaBid and really go crazy. I'm especially interested in selectively breeding these guys (http://www.aquabid.com/cgi-bin/auction/ ... 1271683803) for a true albino strain.

Looks like you're having lots of fun! I want to try it this summer but I'm not sure what to do with them now that I'm pufferless. Didn't you originally want these guys for puffer food?

No, but someone else thought about it. I'll be hatching out some of the eggs for puffer/betta food, though.

I'm so excited - I started bidding on some exotic species on Ebay! I'm gonna go crazy with Sterilite containers in summer housing. Eeeee!!!

I've decided that they're definitely more active at night, by the way.

I purchased a batch of about ten newberryi eggs for $3.25 last night. This is about as cheap as it'll get, though - the others are upwards of $20-30. I'm bidding on a couple strains of cancriformis, Japanese granarius, and aussies. I'd also like to get some black beauties, and in the non-triops notostracans department, I'm looking at bidding on some L. cryptus. Unfortunately, the L. cryptus require chilled aquariums (65 degrees max), so that purchase will be far in the future.

The triops continue to grow, but very slowly - perhaps 1/4" in the past couple weeks. They're still laying like mad!

I began the hatching process 31 days ago. The oldest triops is 29 days old, I think. This means that I can expect them to begin dying off over the next 20 days. They have now reached the low end of the average lifespan. It's extremely rare for this species to live much longer than 50 days.

I must have harvested around one hundred eggs today. I saw a lot more, like before, but I was getting tired of it, so I quit. I'm labeling all the bags of eggs with species, the date they were harvested, the estimated number of eggs in the bag, and which triops they came from (i.e. 1st generation bred by me from Eden Marel).

Aren't you thorough! Good job. If it were me I'd have random unlabeled bags everywhere

Flutter wrote:Aren't you thorough! Good job. If it were me I'd have random unlabeled bags everywhere

"Flutter Clutter?"

If I'm planning to run experiments on them, I might want to know where they came from. And if I wind up ordering albinos and trying to breed a true strain, I'll want to have a system in place for that. I might also start keeping a journal over the summer for this project.

There you go again!

The triops are spending nearly ALL of their time laying eggs! Every time I look, they're laying, laying, laying.

One of them, the runt I think, died. No body - he must have been cannibalized. I haven't seen him (well, I say him, but only 1% of T. longicaudatus are actually male) for about two days now.

You should leave some of the eggs in the tank while it is running to see if they hatch even though they haven't gone through the winter drought phase yet. Perhaps over time a new species would evolve that didn't require the drought to survive.

Actually, the "spring" eggs do hatch without diapause. But they usually hatch quickly and the adult triops eat them.