The Puffer Forum

I've been trying to vary my Porcupine Puffer's diet. He's about 6 inches now and very active. I bought some raw (previously frozen) shrimp from the grocery store deli. I cut up some pieces and gave them to my puffer and dwarf lion. My question is, should I leave the shell on? I know that he needs to chew to trim his teeth, but is this ok?

jasonrusso wrote:I've been trying to vary my Porcupine Puffer's diet. He's about 6 inches now and very active. I bought some raw (previously frozen) shrimp from the grocery store deli. I cut up some pieces and gave them to my puffer and dwarf lion. My question is, should I leave the shell on? I know that he needs to chew to trim his teeth, but is this ok?

I leave the shell on, but normally I have to fish it back out of the tank cause my puffers like to chew it off and just eat the meat. Be careful with that lionfish puffer combination, the relationship often ends badly.

Here is a puffer feeding article, there is a list of good crunch foods for puffers
library/feeding/feeding-your-puffers/

Ends badly for who? They seem to get along now. He is a dwarf so he shouldn't get that big.

accidental stings to the puffer can pose a problem. some puffers survive, some don't. If you go to the hospital section of this forum and then use the search function and type in "lionfish" you will see a bunch of stories detailing lionfish stings.

The porcupine puffers will get much larger than the Lionfish and they tend to nip and sample things in the tank with them.

Porcupines puffers dont have a beak like other puffers. They have 2 crushing plates in their mouth. 1 at the top and 1 at the bottom of their mouth. This is why they dont need shells etc to trim their teeth.

I couldnt bet money on either or..... One can sting, one can decapitate. Its like, who can kill who first, the one with the sword, or the one with the sledgehammer....depends, whoever lands one first. Its up to opinion whos potential injury is worse, both deadly anyways.

The london aquarium has a big tank with about 6 1ft lionfish and 1 1ft porcy in together.

For how long & how large is the tank?

75 gallon, 48" long.

That's certainly not large enough for all those fish!!! My guess is this hasn't been long term & won't end well. See my other post (FW Puffers), about public aquariums.

Many public display tanks appear undersized - they commonly have rather large reservoirs w/high exchange rates to make the display look showier while diluting wastes. Unfortunately, it does boost aggression and stress from too little individual space/territory. PP sees it with what is one of the best large old public aquariums, and I see it from one of the newer large public aquariums near me. They should know better. They usually do, but "show" trumps quality too often.

Porcs do have fused dental plates quite similar to puffers. Porc's fused incisors are two plates, where puffers are four. That is the only difference. They are very closely related groups.

HTH