The Puffer Forum

I've had a porc for for about 4-6 months now and he was eating healthy and doing fine. I fed him last night his feeding of shrimp and he seemed to eat a bit more then he usually does. So, I went to bed and woke up the next morning and found him bloated.. laying at the bottom of the tank. So, I thought perhaps he was having a bladder problem so I went out to get some treatment for him and when I came back he was just dead.

Now, another fact is that yesterday one of my green spotted puffers that lives in the tank with him... they are all around the same size suddenly went missing. I'm wondering if perhaps the porcupine ate a GSP and the poison killed him? But, from what I've researched puffers are immune to the poison. Does anyone else have any takes on what exactly happened?

Everything else that's in the tank is perfectly fine except for my Porc.. who just suddenly died.

So sorry for your loss... Please answer all the Qs above, in red.

Tanks been cycled for about 3 years? It was cycled with Bio Spira and with a nice month of just sitting around along with the addition of a few hardy fish to get things started.

There feeding schedule is around 4-5 o clock as usual and it consists of frozen raw shrimp and he sometimes gets his hands on a ghost shrimp that I feed to the lion fish.

It's got nothing to do with the water parameters.. Everything reads fine. Everything is at 0 except the nitrates which are around 10-25 at max. PH is a good 8.0 last time I checked.


It's inhabitants are three GSP's (bout 3 inches in size) .. a ghost eel, a dwarf lion, a few little hermit crabs very small sized and a scat. It's a 75g tank. I already know how large of a tank the puffer needs when he grows up bigger so don't mind the 75 the Porc was only about 5-6 inches long. I have several other large tanks that he would have been put in once they were ready.

The most of I have done to the tank in the past week was just remove some of the older plant decorations and i've added an algone pad to the filter to export more nutrients considering I wasn't liking the nitrate readings of 25.

Ocassionally.. I will use Stress Coat in the water maybe every couple months. That's about it honestly for chemicals other then the algone pad and carbon filters.

Hmmm... I've heard some really bad things about Algone. Do you still have the body?

A friend of mine uses the algone pads and he has several puffers including a porc and a stars and stripes and his have been fine for years. If the pads were really bad I'm sure i'd see it effecting other fish. The pads have been in there for almost two weeks now. Including i've used them on other tanks and I've had no problems with them at all. Yes, the body is still intact. His stomach was bulged out on one side. I'm wondering where did my smallest GSP go? Suddenly he disappeared and now my Porc dies. The tank is well sealed so he couldn't have jumped out and just in case I checked everywhere around the tank and I also moved all the decor around in the tank but no sign of the little GSP.

Would you be willing to cut him open to take a look inside?

Well, I thought about that myself but, I don't exactly wish to test my luck cutting open one of the most poisonous vertebrate in the world. The skin and other internal organs varying between species is highly toxic.

I am sorry for your loss.

But I agree with PP. Could you ware gloves?

I am sorry to sound callous....but if you do not have gloves you could use a fork to hold the body down and in the other hand use the knife.

I do not think you would have to do a full autopsy..just a cut into the tummy area..I would also ware safety glasses or sunglasses.

I think that this is important for you to do..not only for yourself to answer the mystery of the missing GSP...but also for information's sake...

The mentors would know for certain that porcupines eat GSP's if given the chance and could provide warnings against housing the two together.

Many of us have done autopsies on our puffers.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21404&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=15
2nd to last post.

You're gonna need more than a knife to cut that thick, leathery skin.

sorry for your loss.

It's been forever since I posted this! But, to clarify I did cut him open back then and all I found was some pieces of shrimp in his gut. The GSP was eaten by my ghost eel which I found out later on. Perhaps the Porc ate too much and something happened inside of his intestine or my dwarf lionfish stung him?


Anyways, thanks for the help mates!