The Puffer Forum

Bit worried.
My T. baileyi is puffing herself up a bit to frequently for my liking.
Anyone else with T. baileyi seen such behavior?

She does not seem to be in distress, just pissed off (pardon my french). 3!)

Yeah right with you there bro. My T.baileyi (whoops- let that slip) and T. abei at the moment are puffing for no reason a fair bit. Probably about 3 or 4 times a week.

I've only seen my baileyi puff 2x but on both occasions, there was a clearly identifiable reason: 1) I turned on the lights suddenly in the middle of the night, 2) I had put a tiger loach in the tank to help clear some snails.

Other than than, she has not been puffing regularly. I do notice that when they deflate, the baileyi does it rather quickly and easily. May be for this species, puffing is not as big a deal or as harmful? The ease at which they puff and deflate so quickly makes me feel this way. But it's only a suspicion on my part.

abc

I have not seen that many of my puffers puff underwater, but I have never seen any puff up underwater which had any difficulty at all in deflating. It is what they are built to do, full normal operation. Even the Fahaka that puffed on me during a move between tanks had no problem at all deflating as soon as it was released in the new tank.

Puffing in air is a radically different situation - that they are not designed to handle.

hmm... so when puffers puff and deflate, it's not harmful at all when in water? Makes sense to me but I got the impression (from other posts?) that we don't want puffers to puff (not healthy for them). But in the wild, with all the potential threats, I would imagine they puff alot. I'm sure it's not a good thing to stress a fish so it will puff, but it makes sense to me that the puffing in and of itself is not harmful, just the stress that triggers it? Did I get it right???

yes you are quite correct. though look for anything that triggers the puffing. i had several puffers that hated my blue background (i really didn't like it either, but didn't want to pull out the whole tank from the wall to fix it) they would puff randomly until i switched it over to black. never had another problem.

Have had several porc puffers who after being introduced to the tank would puff in a display of dominance and swim all over the tank fully puffed just to show everyone who was the "big" dog if you will. every time i added another fish (all much smaller than him) hed puff up and blow out the water on them pushing them around. he rather enjoyed annoying the whole tank. and soaking me at every turn.....

Alot of mine puff for the practise I believe. They tend to be the younger ones.

My experience is more akin to Rocker's. It has always been immatures, not adults, doing "practice" puffs, other than the Fahaka which I stressed by moving in jumbo and clear plastic bag. I rarely co-house puffers in any case, so most on mine have been able to see others only through adjacent tank ends.

The practice puffs are system checks as it were. If they are from stress, that is a different thing entirely. We do not want to stress the fish to the point of puffing, that is cruel. But we do not need to be concerned with practice puffs IME.

I love the story of the porcs puffing and displaying to establish themselves in the pecking order - I'd call that aggression, and while it might have been promped by uncertainty and some fear of the new talk, I'd bet it would be fairly effective against most fish other than Tangs. Good puffer story!

Last time I saw lots of puffing, was with a A. Modestus. It kept puffing up and deflating as if it were trying to expel something. Ended up finding a huge piece of gravel coming out of its mouth. So I'm guessing they use it to regurgitate.

The only other time (while back when modestus shipment first arrived) one kept puffing up and pectorals were like really going splashing everywhere. Next week he broke out with ich (sorry to say this.) It was like the reaction of plecos flapping their fins when they start to get an ich infestation in their gills.

Cool idea having all your fish in your sig Sean!

Rocker wrote:Cool idea having all your fish in your sig Sean!

Very awsome! Wish I had enough pics to do that.