The Puffer Forum

hey guys, my first post here, its all in the title, he can still eat ok, but there a bit long for my liking, considering i can see them a lot more then i could before, anything i could feed him to help this, i would prefer not to have to trim them manually.

also while im here, is a SG of 1.008 to much for a F8?

If they are lenghty you will have to treat them manually, just for the future feed him snails and other hard shelled food.

ok, what kind of hard shelled food other then snails can i feed?

at that size, I think snails will be the most effective. You could also try clam and mussels. Crack the shell so that they can get into it, but don't open it all the way so he'll have to use his teeth. This should help scrape them down.

Excellent feeding & dentistry articles in our Library. Crunchy foods are to keep their teeth ground down. Once the teeth are overgrown, there is nothing you can do other than manually trimming them.

ok, hes still able to eat, so im goin to try out maybe getting some sort of shell creature for it to chew on, thanx.

Also, regarding your question about salinity. F8s *generally* prefer around 1.005, but 1.008 isn't all that much higher, so don't worry about it too much. If you're keeping him with other brackish fish that need it at 1.008, then leave it. If he's alone, then you can bring it down to 1.005, but do it SLOWLY (ie. when you do a weekly water change, only reduce the water you put by 0.001). I've read that you can reduce it at a rate of 0.002 per week. The reason is that you don't want to kill the bacteria built up in the filter and a rapid change in salinity could kill a lot of it, causing your tank to go through another cycle.

Hope that answers your question!

thank you for taking the time to answer everyone

btw, he lives with a knight goby and a bumblebee goby, its a 10g tank, i know its a bit over stocked, but no nitrite problems, and the tank has been set up a little over a year.

Could you post a pic of your puffer? I had the same problem with mine a while ago and need to go back and get what I missed soon.