The Puffer Forum

I have a pair of green spotted puffers, and they seem happy enough. They just seem a little lazy when it come to live food. I tried to feed them ghost shrimp and little feeder commets, but the second food tries to get away, they lose interest. They love snails, but snails aren't very good at running away. I once had a commet live in the brackish water with them for 2 weeks. The stupid thing even followed them around the tank. Have I made my puffers lazy by primarily feeding them freeze dried blood worms and sun dried river shrimp? Is there any way I can encourage them to be the sadistic little shrimp eaters they are suppose to be? Right now, I have 2 ghost shrimp happily swimming in their tank, and it just doesn't seem right to me.

How often are you feeding them? Welcome to the forum

Could you give so information about the tank - its size and specific gravity, and the other water parameters?

How long have you had the puffers?

What is their size and approximately how much have they grown for you?

Comets and other feeder goldfish are not good diets for puffers. They commonly are themselves malnourished and may well carry either internal and/or external parasites. Using them as food is very high risk.

GSPs and similar puffers are primarily invertebrate eater, especially snails and other hard-shelled inverts such as suitably sized clams and bivalves and other shellfish.

HTH

It's a 55 gallon with about 20 ppt salinity. Alk, nitrare, and ph are all at good levels.

All that being said, turns out they didn't know what to do with the ghost shrimp. They are still young, less than 2 inches long. The smaller one started by headbutting them, and doing a happy dance. Finnally he took a bite out of the back of one and ate its tail. The bigger one munched his head, and now no more shrimp. It was an entertaining learning experience for humans and puffers alike.

Mine went thru a "lazy" phase but came out of it within 6 months. And yes please do not feed them anymore fish. View the article that PP posted.