The Puffer Forum

Hi I'm new to owning a dwarf puffer, we have him in a big tank to himself with some live plants and some fake until we can get more live ones. He seemed to be doing pretty well the first day, water tests were all normal good temp but he looked extremely skinny, he wasn't eating too much and hasn't been eating much ever since. All days following he's just been sitting on the bottom or on the rocks just moving to a new sitting spot every hour and won't seem to eat. I trust the location I got him from and I'll call them tomorrow to get their thoughts but I wanted to know if this could be IP or if I should just preventativly treat him for IP anyways. He also is completely disinterested in all food live or not. Is he maybe just settling in and is stressed with a new environment? Does he need more live plants to be happy and to explore? Is this IP? Or all of the above??

If he's still eating, treat for IPs, for sure.

He's not, he used to at least nibble on a bloodworm but now he seems as if he's running away from it. He also has this new thing where he kind of spastically swims around, I read some information about pea puffers doing that when bored. I called the establishment I picked him up from and they gave me some advice, I did a 30% water change, I've increased the capacity of the heater Bc it was a bit on the lower side, and I'm picking up metronidazole tomorrow so I hope it works out.

Metro won't work if he's not eating.
library/hospital/internal-parasites-pre ... treatment/
library/feeding/problems-feeding-your-puffer/

He passed before I could buy any treatment. Thanks for the help.

So sorry...
Are you going to get another one?

Yeah at some point, I need to do some water changes and I bought new live plants to help with the ammonia. I had ordered some online and they all arrived dead so I got 2 new ones from a store I trust last night. Hopefully I can catch some issues earlier on and I learned a lot this one around.