The Puffer Forum

There is SO much conflicting information out there so im just going to ask. For the BEST care/life span what does an F8 need marine or brackish if brackish best SG? if marine when do they need to be moved..... and same for the GSP marine or brackish (SG?) and when do they need to be moved?

F8s are strictly brackish, I believe they do best at 1.003-1.008 SG I keep mine at 1.004 or 1.005 it varies.

GSPs generally start at Brackish and end up in Marine conditions approximately 1.021 SG I beleive, someone will chime in about them, I'm more an F8 person.

Thank you, My husband got one of each , lol, we had dreams of a saltwater tank so now we have a "reason" hahaha , how big of a tank do these guys eventually need? Currently in a 55 gal with 4 mollies and 2 yoyo loaches.

I suppose i should add that petco told us they were both the same kind, i didnt think so i was pretty sure we had one of both, but i knew they both could do brackish .... and i couldnt bear to leave either with those idiots........

Lol they say GSPs minimum is 30 gallons, kept singly a 55 I would go bigger if you want to keep other fish. The mollies can be kept with the F8 their minimum is 15 for 1 F8 you could probably do I'd say 30 or 40 g's with the mollies included maybe bigger because mollies are messy too, Yo yo loaches are only Freshwater so you would have to do something with those.

i did a lot of research on the loaches before i put them in there, i LOVE my loaches (we have a tank set up for just my loaches, 3 dojos, 4 kuhlis, and one unidentified), so i wouldnt of put them somewhere that would kill them... The yoyos can be kept ive read up to 1.006 successfully ... We actually have them in a 10 gal slowly (VERY slowly) acclimating them to brackish because they were in fresh....

and if for some reason it looks like the lil yoyos arent doing well ill pull them out and put them in my loach tank , me and my husband check all our fishies several times throughout the day when they are "new"

library/puffers-in-focus/an-introductio ... d-puffers/

library/puffers-in-focus/fig8/

These two puffers should never be housed together. Also the loaches will not fair well in s/w.

IME and and after an awful lot of tank-years of studying them, F-8s are best at 1.003 - 1.005 specific gravity. Above that density, their lives are shortened, just as they are in FW. But I did not test full marine conditions. In the preliminary trials, anything higher than 1.005 reduced their lifespan in my tanks, so there was no point in going full marine.

In the above work, both the specific gravity and the alkalinity were significant, likely equally so. The trial were all done using aragonite substrates to support good alkalinity.