The Puffer Forum

Long story short, i had started to set up a tank. Was in the process of setting up a brackish water tank. Cycled the tank, took forever, and had just planted the plants and set up the rocks when to my surprise my wife came home with fish. Cool, a little early but cool none the less. Come to find out that she found them at Wal-Mart (not the best place to buy fish).
She thought they were cute and bought them. 2 green spotted puffers (at Wal-Mart?) but yeah. I finished setting up the tank (55 gal) and introduced them they were the only fish. The only thing that i did wrong was to not let the plants grow in a little before introducing then. The fish showed up beaten and battered. They were missing a little fin and the one had a little open soar on the side. I know big surprise coming from wal-mart. Well i placed them into the tank. Went out and bought a couple feeder fish, some gut-loaded ghost shrimp, snails, and some blood worms. I did as much research on the fish as i could and i found out that they like to change up there diet. Well they seemed to be OK. The next day, i woke up to find that one was great, green white and swimming all around exploring stuff like hes supposed to do, the other had not moved from where he fell asleep. still breathing and still looking around. He (not knowing the sex its an assumption) had turned a darker green and has dark gray splotches all over his body. Not wanting to infect the other one i immediately put him in a quarantine tank. He has been medicated for the fin loss and open soars but I'm not sure what the gray splotches all over are. He wont eat but is getting more active all the time. ANY IDEAS

MODEDIT - I moved this post to the hospital section.
- Phaedrus

First, welcome to the forum!

You should take a look at this article: http://www.thepufferforum.com/articles/ ... togsp.html
It is a great introduction to green spotted puffers and will help answer some questions.

A few questions:

How did you cycle the tank?
What are your water parameters?
What kind of filtration do you have?
Is the quarentine tank cycled?
What did you use to treat for the wounds?
Can you post a picture?

That'll be a good start anyway...

i ammonia cycled my tank,
specs in both tanks identical
temp 78f
ph 7.1
sp1.011
filtration in the main tank is a aqua-tech 5-15
second tank isn't filtered right now, just a bubble rock

will try to find get picture in the near future, cant find my camera right now

oh medication, melafix, its supposed to encourage fin growth and heal the open wound

It's a new tank... big change, big stress for the puffer. He's probably spent the last week sharing a tiny tank with tens of other GSPs, all wantint to take achunk out of him.

Unless you can see any obvious outward signs of disease, I'd leave him in the main tank. Ideally, you would have quarantined them both beforehand...

Tommyman82 wrote: filtration in the main tank is a aqua-tech 5-15

Is this in the 55g? You need to overfilter the tank, so that filter is not even close to sufficent. I would recommend having atleast twice the recommended filtration on your tank (so, enough for a 110 gallon tank). Puffers need it!

What is your water change schedule?
What are the ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels?

You'll need to do daily large water changes in that unfiltered quarentine tank to keep the toxins from building up and to help the wounds heal.