The Puffer Forum

I just bought a bulk order of 100 freshwater clams from aquabid for my Fahaka. He is 7" and the clams range from 1"-3".

My concern is will it be over kill on his teeth if I only fed clams to him every feeding and nothing else?

I think you probably wasted your $$$ here. Clams from the produce dept are much cheaper. I suggest you freeze the 100 clams to prevent any nasties from infecting your puffer/tank. All puffers need a varied diet, so you will have to supplement with other foods too.

I try very hard to avoid single-item primary diets for most puffers, other than a mostly-snail diet and that is two species from multiple different tanks.

I should of asked in this forum before I placed a bid. Well the clams was only $10 for the whole bulk so it's cool.

Should I quarantine the clams first and then freeze them or can I just toss them in the freezer? so I take it I would have to thaw the clams when time to feed right.

Freezing them for a day or two should kill any bacteria or pathogens present; no need for quarantine in that case. Thaw thoroughly before feeding, yep. And you will likely need to crack their shells open so the puffs can get at the meat.

Aren't those clams alive? I would think you could keep them alive, they don't seem very demanding and feed them ocassionally as a treat. Might have to crack the shell with a pair of pliers first though...

Alive, dead -- it's a stationary food source either way and one method does a better job of ensuring it is disease-free. In this case it should make little difference to the puffer, and much difference to the equipment and time required to quarantine them as live food.

I would think you'd need a 100g tank for all of them.

Very true.. I just guess I see how much my puffers prefer live snails over anything frozen so I was looking at it from the puff's point of view. I wasn't thinking of trying to keep all 100 alive anyways, just some!

I thought the puffers teeth will be able to slice through those clams? oh well now I have to crack 100 clam shells. But it's well worth it for my puffer. I'm just worried those clam shells will cut the puffers inside if they eat it.

I have no idea if a fahaka could chomp through one of those, you'll have to try it and find out. I don't know how hard their shells are, or how much crushing power a fahaka has. I do know you have to avoid MTS snails though since puffers can break their teeth on the shells, so if they have really thick shells... that's where you might have to crack them so the puff can scrape out the meat.

Puffers are very talented at filtering out shell and eating only the meat, so I wouldn't worry about that. I'm interested to hear if your puffer actually identifies the clam as food or if it will need some encouragement...