The Puffer Forum

My F8's teeth seem to have grown a bit. I have always had snails in his tank, but many of the snails i see that are left are the cone snails which he doesn't seem to prefer.

He still seems able to eat, though now with a bit of difficulty. He is a rare one that will actually eat flake food if i drop it in, but now its as if he needs to try to suck it in through the sides of his mouth to get around the tooth. if i drop a pellet in, he struggles to get it into his mouth. he lunges at it, and it bounces away from his mouth.

I just went and found a dozen feeder snails and I placed a piece of lava rock in the tank. Is there anything else i should do to help him whittle that tooth back down?

By cone snails do you mean malaysian trumpet snails? If so you need to remove all of them from the tank as their shells are too hard for a puffer and can break their beak. Also you should only put snails in the tank when you want him to eat and only as many as he will eat in one sitting without blowing up

Moving to the Hospital Forum, since this is a dentistry issue. Please read the article on this in our Library.

taureandragon76 wrote:By cone snails do you mean malaysian trumpet snails? If so you need to remove all of them from the tank as their shells are too hard for a puffer and can break their beak...

Again, I wish people wouldn't go around citing this as fact: I have yet to see any proof whatsoever that this is the case; just one recorded anecdotal instance which wasn't definitely attributed to MTS. If anyone can find an authoritative source which verifies this then I'd be interested in taking a look.

RTR stated that his F8's teeth did chip off by eating MTS.

I thought RTR said that it may have been MTS; that's the one anecdotal instance I meant - it seems like this one case has been the foundation for a blanket 'rule' that this is verifiable fact. I'd still like to hear from more people who experienced the same thing, and from authoritative sources discussing the question.

I feed my gsps, f8s, and porcupine MTS because they reproduce the fastest and grow big fast. The smaller ones I give as is. The bigger ones I crush with my fingers.

I've heard two or so accounts of puffers chipping teeth on MTS, F8's in each case... maybe their teeth run brittle. My GF dumped my F8 Velvet a handful the other day and they were soundly eaten. Shakespeare crushes them to dust, and routinely does some very forceful biting on the much harder live rock in his tank nibbling 'pods.

My DPs can't crush even the tiniest newborns. Then again, DPs tend to suck rather than crush, so that might not be the best example. However, I will say that when I crush the larger ones (1/2-3/4in.) for them, I have to use the blunt end of a pen or some sort of hard tool. They're definitely tough.

1 of my f8s put a whole trumpet snail in his mouth today and it was munched and gone. the have been breeding in my food tank so maybe the tiny ones aren't as hard.

Keeping them in a lower pH might soften the shells, too. Who knows...