The Puffer Forum

We had the pleasure of watching one of our F8 puffers thrust out hundred and hundreds of eggs yesterday. We managed to see this happen twice with about 5 hours inbetween.

What a sight! It was like the snow-domes you can buy at Christmas in our 120 litre tank.

We have only had these two fish for about 2 weeks and thought one was rather fat and named him Fatboy, the other Slim.

However, Fatboy stopped eating for three days and became quite subdued, we thought the little fish was quite ill. What a surprise to see all of those eggs arrive.

We have now renamed them to Bond and Penny. Penny spent the rest of the evening eating all of the eggs she could find. We did rescue a few but I'm guessing they may not have been fertilised as the other puffer (Bond) was no where near during spawning? Penny is now back to a lovely slim body.

Can anybody tell me if the puffers will lay eggs even if there are two females together? Does the male have to fertilise the eggs as the come out?

Where the eggs white or opague?

"Penny is now back to a lovely slim body."

How slim? DO you have any pics?

It is very unlikely that you have fertilized eggs. Puffers are extremely hard to breed.

It is my understanding that after a female egg-layer produces eggs, the male has to fertilize them. I'd love to see pics of the eggs!

What are you feeding them? I am concerned when you call them slim.

The eggs were quite transparent with a little white dot inside.

I managed to take a pretty poor image and you can see her still pushing them out.

All of the white blurs on the images are the eggs floating around the tank. They looked like little tiny bubbles.

I have also uploaded before and after pictures to show how fat she was.

http://s1235.photobucket.com/albums/ff429/Wendy_Lowery/

I hope this link works.

When I say slim, I mean much slimmer than when she looked like she was exploding!

They eat bloodworm, mussels, prawns, krill etc. just once a day. We also feed them a few small snails a day.

Aww, they are cute

That's amazing! What SG are they at? Does it look like the male fertilized them?

Sorry I'm new to keeping puffers, what does SG mean?

I don't think the other puffer was at all interested in the commotions!

fatboyandslim wrote:Sorry I'm new to keeping puffers, what does SG mean?

!

SG means specific gravity. How much marine salt are you adding?

Females routinely dump eggs. Approximately monthly to every two months under stable conditions seems normal for the ones I have seen. Frequently it occurs without our seeing it. We just see a fish getting fat, but not quite with the same profile as as a fat -from overfeeding - puffer. It builds up for some time (weeks) and then goes away. Then it starts building up again.

Most puffers produce very small eggs. The DP is the only one common in the trade that seems to produce largish eggs - which is also why they are the most easily bred in captivity. .The other captive-bred puffers produce tiny fry - which makes feeding the fry difficult. Additionally, we know little about spawning triggers and conditions for breeding in the FW/BW puffers. Overall the hunter-predators tend to be solitary in their hunting grounds, apparently pairing only for mating. The lurkers have been captive bred more than the active hunters. The marine puffers have very tiny fry which tend to be pelagic, spending time in and living on plankton as their earliest food. Those would be the biggest challenge for the amateur hobbyists. But other planktonic larvae have been captive bred, so eventually we should be able to manage it.

To the OP, if you want your puffers to thrive, you MUST keep them in brackish conditions, which means they need marine salt in their water at a specific gravity (SG) of 1.005, measured by a hydrometer.
library/puffers-in-focus/fig8/

We took advice from the shop regarding how much salt to add. They weren't adding much at the shop, we only added enough to make it approx. 1.001-1.002.

We were concerned about adding too much salt as we didn't want to crash the tank.

As I understand it, the puffers will need more salt as they get older?

no not as they get older, right now is fine. 1.005-1.008 is where you want to be.

How fast can we increase this level in order not to crash the tank?

We have a 120 litre tank.All of the websites I have seen so far seem to require massive amounts of salt to be added to bring it up to this SG.