The Puffer Forum

I am VERY new at raising these puffer and I have heard that you have to feed them a certion type of snail and that others can brake there beakes and that could kil them. Is this true? And Do you acctuly have to cut there beakes? If you know anything about the snails or anything that would be helful raisinf them please let me know. Thanks A Bunch[/quote]

There is only one FW snail that is not ideal food for puffers, that is the Malaysian Trumpet Snail. Their shells look like ice cream cones; very pointy and hard. These can sometimes cause tooth breakage, which is best to be avoided. It probably won't kill the puffer but it certainly makes for feeding issues, and a trim would be necessary.

Common pond snails, mystery snails, common ramshorn snails, colombian ramshorn snails are all safe. Feeding a few snails each week, along with other crunchy foods, will keep the GSP's teeth in check and you shouldn't need to trim.

Check out the Library section of this site for a nice article on the care and feeding of GSPs.

Common pond snails (Family: Physidae, Physa is the commonest genus) and common ramshorns (Family: Planorbidae, Planorbis is the commonest genus) are the fastest reproducing and easiest to selct for the proper size to feed to puffers.

All crunchy foods help, but bloodworms are not very crunchy, certainly not enough for puffers with fast growing dental plates such as SAPs.

Also, frozen foods should most definitely be thawed before feeding.

Shell-on shrimp or krill have a bit of bite to them. Cockles, muscles, crab's legs, all involve a certain amount of tooth-scraping to get the meat out. Some also feed their puffs crickets.

Check out this article in the library for other food ideas: http://thepufferforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=12

For the shrimp, crab, cockles, muscles (alive, alive-o...sorry about that), your grocery store is your friend. My wife mistakenly bought a flat pack of frozen krill at the pet store and it was $7 for about 3 oz. I could have bought a pound of shell on shrimp at the grocery store for that cost and frozen it myself.

Eric

The problem is finding shell-on shrimp that's small enough for a F8 or GSP.

You can buy the bigger stuff and cut it into sections so the shell is still on. Also, for a higher price, your LFS may have frozen krill which my figure 8 really seems to like.

I use both FD and frozen krill a good bit for the mid-sized puffers. The FD is presoaked; the frozen is thawed, rinsed, and pre-soaked. Presoaking is standing a bit in vitamin-added water.

Large puffers get grocery store food.