The Puffer Forum

How do you Identify them? What are their favorite foods and do they get along with red cherry shrimp. I don't realy care if the RCS get eaten I have 100s in another tank, just wondering. How plump are these guys suposed to be? He is pretty skinny, but eating.

Which one are you talking about though? the Carinotetraodon irrubesco (Red Tailed Redeye Puffer) or Carinotetraodon salivator (Striped Redeye Puffer)

Any way, from past experience, no matter what puffer you put into a tank with Shrimp, i can guarantee the shrimp will turn into food sooner or later (given that the puffer has an appetite)

For more info on the puffers, have you checked the Pufferpedia under the learn tab??? they have all the puffer info there along with pics

I the first place I checked was pufferpedia, none of my questions are covered and I haven't found any articles on them yet.

Have you looked for ID in our Pufferpedia? There are many species with red eyes.

Post a picture so someone can identify it.
If he's eating well and staying skinny it might be IP's. Have you ever treated him? He will probally eat all the cherry shrimp if he can catch them. Unless he's like my puffer, I think she started a shrimp farm. She won't eat them.

Pufferpunk wrote:Have you looked for ID in our Pufferpedia? There are many species with red eyes.

They all look the same to me, I can't tell which one he looks like.


Carinotetraodon Irrubesco



Carinotetraodon salivator


I can't tell the difference

edmlfc1 wrote:Post a picture so someone can identify it.
If he's eating well and staying skinny it might be IP's. Have you ever treated him? He will probally eat all the cherry shrimp if he can catch them. Unless he's like my puffer, I think she started a shrimp farm. She won't eat them.

All I have to take pictures is my cell phone, but I will try it, he should be easier to take pictures of him than my GSPs.
Yes I treat all my puffers for IPs. I suspect the pet store wasn't feeding him well. As soon as he came out of the bag he was hunting for snails but he ignores the shrimp and guppy fry. last night I saw him stop, look at a guppy and fan his tail out just like he does before lunging at a snail, but then he stopped when the guppy moved its tail a little.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5HrasKMWco
this is the best I can do

Can't anyone tell me the difference? Do female Irrubesco have red tails?

Difficult to say, as the video is seriously out of focus.
Will chance on a male C. irrubesco.

Looks to struggle with internal parasites.
You would do well to put him in quarantine until he is back on his fins.
Would also save your Guppies from suffering a nasty death...

Female C. irrubesco has not a red tail.
They look like this:

Ok I'm pretty sure she is a female C. irrubesco. She is filling out now, that video is from the 3rd day I had her. The first thing I did was treated her for IPs. I am not worried about the guppies, I had hoped they might become puffer food to control their population, but even my GSPs won't eat them..

jmbishop wrote:I am not worried about the guppies, I had hoped they might become puffer food to control their population, but even my GSPs won't eat them..

You keep guppies and GSPs together?
At what salinity?

1.015 and climbing, I even have a guppy in my reef tank, I haven't tried getting them to breed in saltwater but I will find out once My GSP tank is SW. They are thriving in the brackish tank right now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYLaYzuTBM

Wikipedia says "The guppy prefers a hard water aquarium and can withstand levels of salinity up to 150% that of normal sea water, which has led to them being occasionally included in marine tropical community tanks, as well as in freshwater tropical tanks."

At work, and when possible, we use feeder guppies for our piscivore marine fish because most of the time they don't get shocked and just float at the surface like other feeder fish do. In fact a guy today told me he's had a couple of guppies in his saltwater tank for several months now, and they've been doing fine.