The Puffer Forum

I've kept my DPs for quite a long time now and up until about 3 months ago I just fed my DPs frozen bloodworms and the occasional live brine shrimp (they won't eat the frozen ones). Then I went to my LFS and they gave me some pest snails to feed my DPs. Me being naive and uneducated on species of snail didn't realise they were Malaysian trumpet snails and added them to my aquarium, immediately they began to bury themselves into the substrate because the light was on and the puffers didn't even notice they had been put into the aquarium. As anyone who's kept DPs will tell you they sleep at nigh,t and this is the only time the MTSs will come out to eat. Therefore my DPs never get an opportunity to eat them. I tried to manually remove some of the MTS, after dark, and then re add them in the morning, for the DPs to eat, but they weren't having any of it and the MTS quickly then buried themselves into the substrate. Is there any way to get my DPs to eat these snails because the population in my tank isn't huge, but the snails that are there keep uprooting my plants and causing havoc under the substrate. Wish i had never added them!

MTS have way to hard of a shell, even for a larger puffer to eat. Rule of thumb is to feed pond snails the size of a puffer's eye or crush them.

My LFS said (and I’ve read) that DP’s will suck the snail right out of its shell, and won’t bother with trying to crush the shell unlike its larger counterparts, so MTS are fine for them. I read that some people have had luck feeding the MTS some cucumber or algae wafers during the day to entice them to the surface so the DP’s can hunt them. Let me know how this ends up working for you as this was my eventual plan as well.