The Puffer Forum

I bought a F8 puffer that is rather large, probably medium sized, and it eats flake food. I have a smaller F8 that won't touch it, but eats live shrimp, live snails and shrimp pellets. This new puffer didn't eat the snail initially, but after the smaller puffer started on it the new one finished eating it. Is this normal?

Also, I saw spotted and F8 puffers in the same tank in the store. I thought spotted ones were saltwater.

How big is he? Kiwi, tangerine, orange, grapefruit? Sure you do not have a Ceylon?

Flake food is not good enough here is a feeding article just to give you some more ideas besides shrimps and snails- (But, Kudos for giving snails) library/feeding/feeding-your-puffers/

Yes, they are sold in freshwater because for a short period of time they can handle salt changes, but they cannot live in FW for long.

purplecandle wrote:How big is he? Kiwi, tangerine, orange, grapefruit? Sure you do not have a Ceylon?

Flake food is not good enough here is a feeding article just to give you some more ideas besides shrimps and snails- (But, Kudos for giving snails) library/feeding/feeding-your-puffers/

Yes, they are sold in freshwater because for a short period of time they can handle salt changes, but they cannot live in FW for long.

It's pretty big. The Ceylon has black dots on the side near the rear, which this puffer does not have. The puffer is about half the size of a fully-grown, big molly.

I'm pretty sure it's a F8. 2 black spots surrounded by yellow on each side. It is a bit sluggish when hunting snails and loses sight of them. The smaller puffer stole it and ate it. I just hope the smaller one doesn't overeat and explode.

Flake food is not puffer food. You need to train the fish to puffer food ASAP. As already said, there are multiple good feeding items in the Library here. Use therm.

RTR wrote:Flake food is not puffer food. You need to train the fish to puffer food ASAP. As already said, there are multiple good feeding items in the Library here. Use therm.

I got him to eat a whole snail finally. First one I dropped was eaten in 2 seconds by the smaller puffer that was already fat. So I isolated it by dropping a plastic cup over it inside the aquarium. Then I kept showing the snail to the new, bigger puffer and in 2 attempts he ate all of the insides.

In multiple-fish set-up, it is not rare for one to hog the food. But Good Job! on teaching the second fish that snails are food.

kot wrote:

RTR wrote:Flake food is not puffer food. You need to train the fish to puffer food ASAP. As already said, there are multiple good feeding items in the Library here. Use therm.

I got him to eat a whole snail finally. First one I dropped was eaten in 2 seconds by the smaller puffer that was already fat. So I isolated it by dropping a plastic cup over it inside the aquarium. Then I kept showing the snail to the new, bigger puffer and in 2 attempts he ate all of the insides.

I am happy you got them eating snails. That's awesome because flake is no way a good staple for them. The fish store where I got my SAPs some guy was in there arguing with me that flake food is fine for Puffers. Ugh it got me so angry.

You might want to breed your own snail.

Great article in our library how to breed them

PolishPuff wrote:You might want to breed your own snail.

Great article in our library how to breed them

That's very true. I started doing it myself also. It's just so much more easy to breed your own then going to a bunch of LFS' and getting them. Plus once you have them QT'd you know they are safe which is a very big plus.