The Puffer Forum

Well, I have read the article on this but cant believe I am going to try it lol. I am really nervous about doing the whole procedure so wanted to ask just to make sure that everything in that article is all correct and up to date. I did purchase clove oil and cuticle clippers. Anything else I should know before attempting this? I broke my front tooth when I was younger and all I can think about when I think of trimming the puffers teeth is a giant pair of wire cutters clipping of my front tooth like some kind of nightmare.
BTW it is one of my 3 fig8's that need trimming, for whatever reason the other two seem fine even though I only give em snails every so often (but will definitely be giving them more snails from now one). Oh, and after the procedure can the puffer be fed snails right away or is there any recovery time for the teeth? Thanks.

good luck!

Its not so bad. Just make sure you have a bowl of fresh tank water right there to move them to when you are done clipping.

Their teeth aren't hard like ours, more like a fingernail, so its not so bad.

Just watch out for their lips and do the best you can. I try to pull their upper lip back a little so I can see better.

Yeah, I clipped the top lip off this one:

It healed fine though. Now Hubby helps me.

poor guy. Did it grow back?

Nope, lipless ever since. One of my 1st attempts at trimming.

I think I will go check my snail colony now...I dont ever want to have to trim teeth after seeing that...
I am already paranoid about trimming...now I am down right scared of it. Thankfully given the alternative its an easy choice to make...but still, it makes me queezy

Even I made some mistakes at 1st! That puffer ate the best & grew the largest of all his 4 other SAP tank mates.

Not taking a shot at ya...
I have made worse mistakes in the beginning...and I am still a newbi, in every respect.
pic just reminded me of a public health warning...
made me want to give up habits I dont even have

BTW it is a very good pic

Ok, so I'll probably try it tomorrow. After that, I'll definitely step up on the snail feedings. I've got a ton of them now anyhow, just often lazy and go for the quick frozen cube food instead of picking snails out of my other tank.

Also, I have been able to get my puffers to eat 1 kind of dried food... Tetra Baby Shrimp 'sun dried gammarus'. They are whole dried shrimp and the puffers will eat these unlike any other dry food I've tried. And they are very crunchy, but I wonder if they actually would help wear their teeth at all or is the crunch misleading. By reading it I get the impression its mostly for 'roughage'. I give them these a couple times a week in addition to other food to for variety.

Well didnt get around to it until today but pulled it off ok. I put an extra drop in (4 drops) since the small container I transferred the puffer from dumped a little more water into my container with 3 cups. But even with the extra drop he never bellied-up and after setting motionless on the bottom for a couple minutes I figured I needed to do something before he was in there too long. This is the smallest of my 3 puffers and probably 1.5" body length at most. I had trouble getting the clipper around the whole tooth so I just clipped smaller pieces multiple times. Plus I was a bit shaky and he did twitch a couple times. It was taking too long and I was having difficulty clipping any further so I ended up trimming just over half the exposed teeth... good enough for now I guess. The bottom teeth also were long enough to clip so I clipped them back some too. He recovered just fine, and after not to long I dropped a few snails in there and for the first time in a long time he was able to eat them without any problems. Thanks everyone for the help... he probably would eventually have starved to death if someone in another forum hadnt mentioned the dentistry post here.

Congrats on your 1st puffer procedure! I knew you could do it!

Congradulations! The first time is always the hardest, between not knowing what to expect and dealing with the weird way the teeth have grown. Next time, assuming you don't let them grow too long, they'll be a lot easier to trim because they are now in the proper shape to start with.

We really need to make a video of this... the worst part, IMO, is not knowing what to expect as far as the puffer getting "knocked out" and how long for it to wake up, etc.

Thanks everyone, just glad its over... and now I know better what to do but hopefully with enough snails shouldn't have to do it again. I guess that's the problem with keeping more than one... if one is more passive and another more dominant that the dominant one(s) will seize most of the good food like snails. I think this is what happened to me. From now on I will try to wait until the smaller one is away from the others and drop in snails near both groups so they should all get the chance to have snails.

BTW, anyone have any recommendations on how much snails it will take to keep their teeth in check?

Myaj wrote:We really need to make a video of this... the worst part, IMO, is not knowing what to expect as far as the puffer getting "knocked out" and how long for it to wake up, etc.

I was thinking about making a video clip of my trimming (my digital camera takes pretty good video... I am always taking video of stuff) but my batteries were dead plus I didn't really know what I was doing!

Yes, and it would be hard to take the video and do the prodecure as well. You'd really need two puffer-knowledgable people to do it, one to do the trimming, one to know what to video...