The Puffer Forum

like those Asian lady beetles... I just found remnants of one in his tank.

Good, bad, harmful?

I'm sure there's a topic on it somewhere (if there is, please direct me to it!), but what kind of random bugs are ok for my puff to eat?

crickets, mealworms, superworms, and nightcrawlers are ok..

eww meal worms..

and these things don't carry any disease or anything I should be worried about?

not that im aware of..alot of fish and reptiles eat them i've never had a problem with them. Over feeding any one type of food isn't good in any species though so give him a mixed diet as much as possible anyway

busybones wrote:Over feeding any one type of food isn't good in any species though so give him a mixed diet as much as possible anyway

Like Busybones said not to much of one type of food, I'm sure PP has said before that to much Mealworm causes indigestion as the Puffer has a hard time digesting the Mealworms skin!

Very true..the meal worms can cause digestion problems in lizards too i've only fed them a couple of times as snacks he like'em but he doesn't get them too often, I feed alot of crayfish but supplement that with various things to even out his diet..seems to be working

puffertt77 wrote:I'm sure PP has said before that to much Mealworm causes indigestion as the Puffer has a hard time digesting the Mealworms skin!

So you should skin them? just kidding

One of my puffers ate a yellow jacket once. It got into the tank somehow, and apparently looked enough like a shrimp to warrant eating. The thorax with the wings was all that was left, he ate the head, the abdomen(including the whole stinger), most of the legs, and sucked all the white bug goo out of the chest, which I found hollow and floating in the current.

Eeeeeew!

that's all I could think.

Well, the cricket survived my ceylon.. well.. kinda, it ended up drowning before it got eaten. Poor thing. It was so cute. The GSPs, on the other hand, DEMOLISHED the crickets as soon as they hit the surface.

I might try a nightcrawler soon. That seems like a treat they'd LOVE!

Just make sure the worm dose not hide/bury its self. I tried a worm once and I accidentally dropped it and it went straight into the rocks and I never saw it again.

Earthworms are a regular diet for my larger puffers. Any bugs found in the house--spiders, beetles & thousand leggers, are all tossed into the tanks.

ewww.. I never would have thought of throwing all these bugs in my tanks...... kinda gross, but hey, it's the circle of life!

I did run into a problem once with one of my SAP's eating a bug. I don't know if the bug was the cause of death or just a coincidence..

It was a box elder beetle (kind of looks like a lightning bug, black with red marks on its wings).

The sap stopped eating, had trouble swimming, had a hard lump in the belly, etc.. did everything I could but it died the same day. Previously had been perfectly healthy, and its tankmate, another SAP was just fine. Curious as all heck, I did a rough dissection of the fish to see if anything looked weird.. and found the shell/wings? of a box elder beetle inside the fish, undigested. The body itself was digested, but not the hard shell.. I *think* the fish couldn't digest it or maybe it got stuck.. I don't know how they could eat snails but not one of these little bugs.

Anyways, it still seems like a sort of "freak accident", but I make sure I don't toss those types of bugs in the tank.