The Puffer Forum

I am trying to find some cultures for live food for dwarf puffers. I am going to pick up some frozen bloodworms but I want live food too. I have an earthworm colony started but had no luck getting my first puffer to eat them. Sadly I lost him and I am starting over. I found someone selling banana worms, microworms, and walter worms for a very reasonable price. I do not know if puffers will eat them though. I was also wondering if dwarf puffers will eat detritus worms. I found some in one of my aquariums and thought about growing them if that would be good for a dwarf puffer. Can someone suggest a good live food I could grow myself?

Worms I am not too sure. But u can try breeding cherry shrimps. They reproduce like rabbits if your water condition is kept right.

Not too sure about any of those worms to be honest, you could try blackworms

You can breed daphnia quite well in big buckets of water.

I would mention Whiteworms but some say they are fatty. I have read articles where you can change the make up of nutrients within the worms by what you feed them on. Mine enjoy raw porridge, blanched spinach, fish flake and algae wafers. I like feeding them fish food as i'm sure it makes the worms more nutritious.
If i was a conspiracy theorist, then I'd say there's a bit of scare tactics about these worms as you never need to go to an lfs for food again. My dp has been fine for years on them.

If lived near an lfs with live food then I'd go for bloodworm and less whiteworm to be honest.

Has anyone try breeding Scuds before??

Puffers are what their prey eats. Cultured live foods are great for getting veggies etc into puffers

I live in the middle of no where and cannot find a lot of things for fish care locally. Even the small pet shop here cannot get a lot of stuff. I have ghost shrimp and blue pearl shrimp breeding colonies. I also have lots of ramshorn snails. My first puffer did not make it and would not eat the live shrimp, earthworms, dried bloodworms or un thawed frozen shrimp I offered him. He did eat snails but I was told that would not be enough for him. He developed a fungus infection and died three days after I got him. I have since cleaned the tank and reset it up. It has cycled again and the snails have repopulated so I want to try it again. I just want to make sure I have some type of worms he will eat. It is extremely expensive to order frozen food from every on line store I could find. I couldn't find anyone on the fish sites I frequent that had live bloodworms I could buy. I do have a frog pond that has tubifex worms in it. I thought about getting some of those and trying to raise them but keep reading that they may have parasites. It is a pond on my own property that is fed by a natural seep spring and I don't use chemicals on my property so that part should be okay. Would that be a good idea? I am going to a larger city that has a Petland and a Bert's Pet Center and will check to see if either of those carries frozen worms.

Most hobby-bred foods are too soft as any staple for a puffer. IMHO and IME, the only suitable food for a staple diet is snails - either ramshorns or common pond will do. Those are both quite easy.

If you can breed snails yourself and they are clean from pests etc then some people do that. If you have to get them from other sources then Snails are like Tubifex worms with the potential of bringing in pests and disease.
I could never get enough snails breeding for my set up. If the snails are bigger than a few millimetres then the DP will bite the snail, kill it, not eat the snail and then waltz off causing the water to deteriorate.

When choosing my DP I asked the LFS kid to try feeding the fish with frozen food and I'll pick out the one which eats it. Problem being, there was about 30 fish in the tank and the kid wasn't interested either. My DP was the wrong fish and then refused frozen and so began a life of live food.

Live ramshorn or common pond snails from the LFS are suitable as food for DPs and other captive puffers if they have been QT'd for a month or two in their own well-maintained tank. No fish parasite or infectious fish disease will survive without its proper host for that period. All it requires is a bit of planning in advance of getting the fish. Since it takes that long to get a stable snail colony going, it need not be a big deal. Snail size selection is important for DPs. For SAPs and F-8s it is less limiting.

Training puffers to take home-reared snails in captivity is not difficult. Just pre-crush the sail with the feeding frcepts. Most will get the idea immeditely. If they do not, try feeding the crushed snail at the time as the other live food used.

HTH

They reproduce like rabbits if your water condition is kept right.

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