The Puffer Forum

Hi. One of my DP's has become incredibly picky and has stopped eating. The only thing he seems to want to eat are pond snails. I have a snail breeder set up but unfortunately the snaily crop are growing too slowly for my poor dps needs. Does anyone have any spare snails they'd be willing to part with? I would be very willing to send money to cover postage.

I would just go to Petco or Petsmart and ask them for some there. I can generally get 50-100 per visit for free. You can also buy bloodworms or small earthworms if he will take either of those. I don't know many puffers that can resist a wriggling worm.

sadly i tried all the local petstores tonight. 1 said they had none, the other said that theirs were all reserved for some "puffer lady" and so they wouldn't give me any. He won't eat bloodworms and i haven't tried earthworms yet but it did rain here tonight so i might be able to find some tomorrow morning.

walmart carries worms also

Have you tried starving him for 1-2 days? That may make him willing to eat again, or you can also try and get some garlic extract.
good luck!

Just so everyone knows, she tried garlic, and the fish IS starving, that's why this is so urgent. You can't starve DP's into eating.

Phoenix, I honestly thought many members would be more than willing to send you snails, I thought maybe someone near you could even meet you. I mostly have bigger snails, and most are ramshorns. I will gather up as many small ones as I can find, and some big ones too for breeders. I've never mailed anything alive before!

Thank you so much. I managed to find 1 fairly large snail in my other tank last night and managed to catch the shifty little devil. The puffer wolfed it down and had a nice round belly, he's back to being skinny again this morning but at least that one snail bought me some time. I'll check with walmart to this afternoon. I can pm you my address, if you send me yours i can send over some $ to cover the cost of shipping. When my plants arrived they were wrapped in wet newspaper and some kind of plastic bag, maybe ziplock and the snails were alive and kicking in there even though the package had come from Asia.

I'll send my address over this afternoon, i'm rushing out to do some horse training thing right now. Thank you so much!

have you tried California black worms?

Yes, please PM or email me your address, I'll send them out today. Hopefully some of the bigger ones will be gravid.

I only have Malaysian Trumpet Snails. I don't think those would be a good match for Dwarf puffers sadly enough.

Nope those dudes are hard as diamonds, although I think dwarf puffers are snail slurpers.

sevenyearnight wrote:Nope those dudes are hard as diamonds, although I think dwarf puffers are snail slurpers.

Even my 2inch GSP cant crack em open unless I give him ones that are small. But those he swallows whole rather than cracking them due to their size. So I crack open adults for him a little so he still gets a good few bites out of the shells itself as well.

Being on the other side of the big pond I doubt there would be much use in sending them over though . They would probably die somewhere along the way.

Here's an auction on aquabid.com it has a buy it now.
http://www.aquabid.com/cgi-bin/auction/ ... 1316970525

There are a few other auctions but this one looks like the best price to me.

If you were more local I'd sell you my breeder set up. They are in the basement empty now