The Puffer Forum

I've been keeping my GSP in a freshwater environment for a couple of months now and he seems fine. Is it possible to continue this or will I shorten his life if I don't continue a move to a brackish environment? He is about one inch long now, and still seems very lively.

Also, will he eat himself to death? I have seen him eat so much that he just sits on the bottom for an entire day. But also, I've been reading around and have heard that snails can co-exist in an environment with the GSP so as long as he is well fed and their reproduction rates are suffice for his appetite, on top of whatever else is fed to him. As an omnivore, what kind of vegetation do these fish prefer?

I also noticed that he prefers the sun-dried shrimp I'm feeding him, over the live Ghost shrimp in the tank as he's left most of them alone. Don't know what to say here.

And one last question I've been having trouble finding, is there a brackish dwarf hairgrass or a plant like it? Or will dwarf hairgrass survive in a brackish environment?

Thanks for any and all help. Hoping to give my favorite fish a long happy life.

Start here; library/puffers-in-focus/an-introductio ... d-puffers/

Welcome to the Forum...

Please read the artical that PP provided..it is very helpful and will answer alot of questions you may have...

About the Snails...Overfeeding your Puffer to keep him from eating other tank mates is a bad idea. You should feed him until he is nice and round then stop..Do this daily skipping a day each week. As he gets older you will need to feed him less often. Snails are very important to keep the Puffers teeth trimmed down. I would recommmend giving him snails about 3 days a week..I also think it would be near impossible to raise snails in the same tank as a Puffer...Mine would run around plunking snails off the glass all day! It would be best to have a smaller tank set up to breed your snails in..

As far as vegetation..you can gut load (feed) those ghost shrimp alege waffers before putting them into the puffer tank...the puffer will eat the shrimp and thus get a serving of Vegies while he's at it..If he'll eat the Ghost shrimp...

busybones wrote:Welcome to the Forum...

Please read the artical that PP provided..it is very helpful and will answer alot of questions you may have...

About the Snails...Overfeeding your Puffer to keep him from eating other tank mates is a bad idea. You should feed him until he is nice and round then stop..Do this daily skipping a day each week. As he gets older you will need to feed him less often. Snails are very important to keep the Puffers teeth trimmed down. I would recommmend giving him snails about 3 days a week..I also think it would be near impossible to raise snails in the same tank as a Puffer...Mine would run around plunking snails off the glass all day! It would be best to have a smaller tank set up to breed your snails in..

As far as vegetation..you can gut load (feed) those ghost shrimp alege waffers before putting them into the puffer tank...the puffer will eat the shrimp and thus get a serving of Vegies while he's at it..If he'll eat the Ghost shrimp...

Thanks for all your help. I wasn't aware that their food consumption decreased with age. I actually am not feeding him to keep him from eating other tankmates. His other tankmates are his food for now, and probably will remain so. Not to mention, he has a preference for snail over anything else I've fed him. I actually was hoping that I could keep a population of snails inside of his tank, but I don't think this will work well as you've already stated, unless. that is.. maybe it was well planted or something. Although unlikely, I will see how it goes. I currently have another tank with swordtail in it as a means of breeding snails because I was tired of purchasing them. However, the snails are getting out of hand and reproducing too fast for their own good. There have been a couple die off cycles in the snail population so I've had to remove a number of dead snails in the past. Today, I placed around 30+ snails into my puffer's tank, and upon observation he seems to have stopped feeding on them, although they are in plain site. I'll see how that goes. It should help with the overpopulation problem, and I'm pretty confident now that my puffer won't eat himself to death judging by his disinterest in more food at this point.

As far as vegetation, I hadn't thought of that- but the shrimp are consuming a lot of algae that has been growing inside of my tank. So maybe that's taken care of. I have noticed him, at times, plucking the side of the tank for algae, which definitely confused my girlfriend and I earlier until I discovered they also consume plant material. Also there has been an increase of algae in my tank since the introduction of two full spectrum bulbs. I have concerns that it might become harmful at some point, so I've been cleaning it regularly. I've also noticed that since I've introduced the new lighting my puffer has been more active, and that this might coincide with the increase of algae.

That's basically the background. Thanks for clearing up some of those questions, definitely appreciated.

Also, the information provided in that link is definitely helpful. Thanks for sharing, it answers my questions concerning water conditions, definitely. Hope some of you can share more of your knowledge, I'm definitely interested in keeping this fish for a long time. He seems more intelligent and interesting than any other fish I've owned and definitely has a personality.

Freshwater will certainly shorten his life and won't allow him to grow to his full potential.

Yes, they can eat themselves to death.. their skin is very stretchy and I've seen pictures of puffers who ate so much they literally split open. Not good. If he's not chasing the live shrimp, he's probably just too lazy, why work for his food if you are giving him the easy stuff, and so much of it that he just lays on the bottom!

For the plants, brackish can be trickly. There aren't many plants that can survive into higher brackish levels, but the good news is, once you do get to higher, nearly marine levels, which your GSP will need sooner or later, there is also "macro algae" which is basically saltwater plants. The selection isn't huge, but there's enough out there to make a very interesting and beautiful tank. Of course, there's always fake plants too

Food consumption does not decrease with age, it increases as long as the puffer is actively growing - which is until the fish is full size. After that consumption does taper off a bit, but it is not a marked decline in total intake per week, it is just a difference in meal size that the keeper offers. You cannot give a 1" puffer the same mean size that you do to a 6" puffer.

Grossly overfeeding a young puffer, in fact any aged puffer or any other fish or pet, routinely is very hard on the liver and kidneys of the fish or other pet, just as it is in humans. That too will shorten their lives.

Puffers do get green in their diet from what their prey eats. They also get chance bites of whatever vegetation their prey is grazing when they capture that prey. Marine and reef puffers, which GSP are not, do eat plant material regularly. FW and BW puffers do so much less often, relying on their prey to eat their veggies for them, just as 4-legged land predators do - their preferred food is usually the grazers in their environment. We have to make up for that for our captive fish. But you cannot count of predators and prey co-existing in a captive environment. It just does not work out that way. The dunamics and kinetics are all wrong.

HTH

RTR wrote:Food consumption does not decrease with age, it increases as long as the puffer is actively growing - which is until the fish is full size. After that consumption does taper off a bit, but it is not a marked decline in total intake per week, it is just a difference in meal size that the keeper offers. You cannot give a 1" puffer the same mean size that you do to a 6" puffer.

Grossly overfeeding a young puffer, in fact any aged puffer or any other fish or pet, routinely is very hard on the liver and kidneys of the fish or other pet, just as it is in humans. That too will shorten their lives.

Puffers do get green in their diet from what their prey eats. They also get chance bites of whatever vegetation their prey is grazing when they capture that prey. Marine and reef puffers, which GSP are not, do eat plant material regularly. FW and BW puffers do so much less often, relying on their prey to eat their veggies for them, just as 4-legged land predators do - their preferred food is usually the grazers in their environment. We have to make up for that for our captive fish. But you cannot count of predators and prey co-existing in a captive environment. It just does not work out that way. The dunamics and kinetics are all wrong.

HTH

The weird thing is, he hasn't consumed enough to become stressed since I overfed him the first two times, and he's displayed self restraint over the past couple months when provided the opportunity to overfeed. It's as if he's learned not to overeat because of the correlation between pain and overfeeding most likely, for instance right now he's not interested in eating any and he's already fed on a couple snails provided- not bloated up with food to a point of being immobile or seem bothered, even though the snails are in plain sight- he has chosen not to consume them. I guess that isn't too weird, considering if the majority of GSP in youth found a snail in the wild (where they are readily available) twice its size, I wouldn't suspect it to eat itself to death. If that were the case, they wouldn't exist at all. I suspect this has more to do with scarcity. Both animals and people are more likely to eat larger portions if provided with a food not usually available that happen to be high in desired nutrients. If I can provide an environment where average reproduction of the snails outweighs demand by providing adequate cover and environment for the prey, why is it wrong of me to assume that it might work?

Okay, I think there's two different scenarios here.

#1 GSP in a tank stocked with snails all the time
and
#2 GSP with no available food unless human gives it to them

Situation #1, Puffer will hunt when it is hungry, and when it is full it will stop, fully knowing there is plenty of food there for it next time it gets hungry. No reason to stuff itself, because it knows there's plenty more. The reason this won't work for you long term is simple, higher salinity levels will kill the snails, and if you stay freshwater, it will eventually kill the puffer.

Situation #2 is what most of us do for brackish/marine puffers, and because we choose when they eat they tend to gorge themselves. As they grow, of course they will eat more, but most of us have found they often like to eat less often. My mature puffers tend to only "ask" for food every few days, while younger ones were often at the glass begging. Anyhoo, when you are providing the only food, feed them until their belly is nicely rounded and no more, remove any uneaten food so it doesn't rot and pollute the tank.

Its very likely your puffer wasn't getting good food at the store, and simply gorged himself at first because it had been so long since he'd had a "good" meal. Too many stores think that puffers can eat flakes or freeze dried krill and stay healthy.

It is also highly likely to the point of near certainty that your captive puffer is getting far less exercise in captivity than its wild cousins. All the food availablity and reduced exercise leads to chubby captive puffers who will not live long lives. I believe you are mistaken on the ready availability of food in the wild - resources are periodically plentiful, with thin stretches in between. Which is why most fish gorge themselves - they have no internal feedback mechanisms to say "that is enough for today" - it would not be an effective survival strategy in the wild. There may be no bounty tomorrow in the wild. Our captives live easy lives in the effort required to get food, and are too restricted in space and current so they get fat and destroy their livers and kidneys as well as fouling their tanks. If you do not limit food intake, your captive will be lucky to live half its proper captive, predator and disease-free life expectancy. Overfeeding or misfeeding is second only to mistreatment of disease in shortening captive lifespans, and likely exceeds stress as a life-shortening factor.

Do feel free to prove me wrong, but until you have statistically significant lifespan studies of ad lib feeding of captives, I will respectfully disagree. Chubby adult fish do not last.

OH REALLY? BURMENS AND SIMON 2004. JK

Well, like what Myaj said, either way I'm moving to brackish. The population isn't going to survive. :]