The Puffer Forum

hey guys, i'm new to this so bear with me. We have a 30 gallon x high saltwater tank that we set up 3 months ago. We cycled the tank for 1 month and when everything was stable we added our porcupine puffer. She was doing great, we had her eating crayfish, crabs, saltwater glass shrimp and sometimes feeder minnows. We decided to add another fish a dragon wrasse and she seemed to be fine. The next night we fed her feeder minnows and the next morning we noticed all the feeder minnows in the holding tank were dead and our puffer seemed to be acting strange. We couldnt figure out if it was the new fish or the feeder minnows.We called the store where we bought the minnows and they assured us it wouldn't hurt our puffer, but all she did tonight was swim into rocks, breath heavily and her color is really white, not as vibrant as it usually is. Our ph is 8.2, our ammonia is 0, our nitrite is 0 and our nitrate is 20. We do water changes every 2 weeks and clean out the tank every other day, we don't know what to do she looks like she might not make it through the night.

How large is your puffer? 30g is going to need to be upgraded to 100g just for the puffer. They have an extremely high bioload. Try to keep the nitrate <20. Minnows arew not a good food for your puffer, they are crustaceon eaters. Do a 50% water change right now & be sure to remove all the dead pieces of fish.

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately our puffer died last night. RIP Ellen