The Puffer Forum

New to the forum here and a new puffer owner too. It seems the debated and i'm getting a 50/50 here. Sites like WWM say its healthy and necessary for young puffers to snack on snails. Other sites say it brings parasites. Their seem to be two different kinds of nassarius snails. The ones from the reef and the ones from more northern areas invading cost lines. Does anybody have good experienced or bad with feeding live food to their puffer? My puffer is passing on krill and enriched mussels only eating shrimp and freshwater clams. I have one oyster i have not tried and was thinking scallops but have not found shelled yet. I am trying to get a well rounded diet. I'll go ahead and list my tank...

ph... 8.3
am... 0
ni... 0
na... 10
sal... 1.021
inhabitants... tomato clown, yellow tail damsal, and stars and stripes puffer. No problems between damsels.
feeding... listed above plus small bit flakes and brine for damsels.
no changes to tank
cycled... over a month plus plenty of seeded water from reef tank.

Also, i have seen one forum post from pufferpunk preferring not to feed SW snails to SW fish. Maybe i can get a response from you? Thanks...

I might have posted in the wrong discussion and am sorry about that.

that's a beautiful pic! a little photoshop touch up and it is a photo of the month contender

i'll have to go check that out.

As for snails, someone will come along and get you the advice you need Wild caught are a bad idea though, thus the parasites.

I'd breed them but you have to start somewhere. Tank raised would be a tough find.

someone correct me if I am wrong (again), but many snails sold in shops crome from breeders. Of course there always risks introducing a new animal into a tank.

I am also starting to breed my own snails but not for SW fish... similar situation but different circumstance

I am big on feeding snails - some of my puffers have lived long and well and basically on a fresh snail diet. BUT none of those snails was every anything but tank-bred and reared by me, and many generation away from anything wild-caught. No way would I feed live wild-caught..

Those that were in SW generally were habituated/trained to FW snails, with a dropped in snail never reaching the bottom of the tank. But the larger puffs got mainly fishmarket foods for human consumption, most frozen and thawed before use...

Parasites are not a problem if you quarantine new snails (any live food should be quarantined). You'll be even safer if you breed your own.

LilGreenPuffer wrote:Parasites are not a problem if you quarantine new snails (any live food should be quarantined). You'll be even safer if you breed your own.

I have a reef tank as well and i have already fed him some nassarius snails out of there. I was thinking of loading up my reef tank with them as a holding and maybe breeding tank. Would that be quarantined enough?

You own them already? That's fine. You don't need to quarantine anything that's from your own established setup. I was talking about if you, for example, brought home pest snails from a store.

LilGreenPuffer wrote:You own them already? That's fine. You don't need to quarantine anything that's from your own established setup. I was talking about if you, for example, brought home pest snails from a store.

I only have a dozen or so. I will need more. I could get like 100 of them and they will be in the reef for a while before feeding. Sound good?

No, you need to quarantine new ones before adding them to your established system.

Sounds like expensive meals (I know the cost of SW snails). I'm sure RTR is correct about feeding all the snails he does to his puffers but I rarely do. There are just so many other good, crunchy, easier to feed foods for them.

Love your pic, BTW.

cycled... over a month plus plenty of seeded water from reef tank.

Although I don't doubt your tank is cycled, there is very little "seeding" bacteria in water.

Pufferpunk wrote:Sounds like expensive meals (I know the cost of SW snails). I'm sure RTR is correct about feeding all the snails he does to his puffers but I rarely do. There are just so many other good, crunchy, easier to feed foods for them.

Love your pic, BTW.

cycled... over a month plus plenty of seeded water from reef tank.

Although I don't doubt your tank is cycled, there is very little "seeding" bacteria in water.

Also, 30 LBS live rock added to filtration system. I have test kit and the tank actually cycled twice. Also, they are about $1 two and would hope they would start breeding. Yes it's expensive but so are these oysters for a $1 each that he loves.