The Puffer Forum

Yay or Nay for food?

Yay aslong as you gut load them!

yay, I know my F8 loves them!

How would I gutload them? I know how to do it for like insects since I owned a bearded dragon and the supplements but not so much fish!

Feed them algae wafers, then your puffer will get his vegetables too.

Flake food, algae wafers, as well as fresh sliced cucumber or peas. I like to stick them in vitamin water right before I put them in my puffer tanks too. Without the gutloading, they are basically void of any nutrition.

Live foods at the LFS tend to starved and polluted. If you QT ghost shrimp and others in a tank and feed them well for 3-4 weeks, their food value goes way up.

But for F-8s, SAPs, and GSPs, their crunch factor is too low for a staple diet of these critters.

What the whales harvest in the ocean is not the same as what has been collected weeks ago and not fed since, plus has been over crowded and badly maintained.

Ahhh I see. Well can puffers eat crunchy insects or is that no go since the exoskeleton isn't digestible?

He means crunchy like a crab shell or snail shell !

They can eat crunchy just about anything appropriate for their size. I even feed mealworms to my puffers as long as they are already dead. Of course their most natural food are going to be the ones found in the water in the wild, ie snails, crabs, clams, as mentioned above.

I understand what you mean but from what I was told it was bad to feed them meal worms since they are hard to digest...but meal worms are expensive I can get ghost shrimp 100 for 5$ so would a 2.5g tank be sufficient for the ghost shrimp? Of course with a small filter

Where are you able to get that many for so cheap? The local stores sell them for at least $1 each!

fahucker wrote:I understand what you mean but from what I was told it was bad to feed them meal worms since they are hard to digest...but meal worms are expensive I can get ghost shrimp 100 for 5$ so would a 2.5g tank be sufficient for the ghost shrimp? Of course with a small filter

The chitin in their exoskeletons is difficult to digest even for reptiles, so you are completely right. If mealworms are to be fed at all, it must be after they are freshly molted. This keeps chitin to a minimum, while providing an occasional treat for my GSP. Even then, their head is essentially impossible to digest, so that should be cut off. The only reason I give them at all is for variety, as I do believe that snails, worms, crayfish, shrimp, and cockle are the best and most natural foods for our puffer friends.

100 for $5 is insane! I can get then for 30 cents each so 100 would cost me 30 bucks. You're flipping a lucky s o b. Tarp lol

I have found them around here 12 for $2.00