The Puffer Forum

That's right, I now have two little terrors, Zhi and Zhuang, prowling my planted 15 gallon tank!
(I will try to post pics soon)

For those of you who don't know, I have 2 F8s and a few other brackish inhabitants in my 35 gallon, and I have 15 gallon snail breeder set up. One factor that led to my purchase is that my snails were a wee bit more prolific than I had anticipated; I netted out a clump of 30 snails and dumped them in my F8 tank, and that didn't even dent my snail population. I only intended to feed my figure eight duo a few snails a week, and recently I've been feeding 5 or 6 every other day!

I needed to curb my snail population so I decided to go with an idea I've been holding off on for several months and now I've got my tiny little DPs. The tank is overfiltered and I check the water params frequently so I felt it was safe to add the two of them. So far they've done an excellent job hunting smaller snails, and combined with me feeding extras to my F8s, we're keeping the snail population to much more reasonable levels, with out overfeeding. Hopefully the snail population will stay low... It was a real pain. I'm almost hoping the snails are wiped out because they were out of control. Has anyone else had this problem?

DPs have a lot more personality than I expected them to. Zhuang especially, because when I was at the LFS looking at their tank of DPs, she came right up to the glass and watched me for about five minutes. I knew I had to get her! As far as I can tell (they're both very tiny-about as big as my Molly fry are) Zhuang is a female and Zhi is male. Maybe I can get some opinions on their sexes after I post a pic. So anyways, that's a quick update of what has been going on in my world "fish-wise". Felt like I owed everyone a quick post; I've been so busy lately!



PS: I feel bad that I don't have time to ship snails out otherwise I could have jump started a lot of snail breeders for you all.

Great news Michelle, sounds like you really like your DPs.

Have you been to http://Www.DwarfPuffers.com ?

Great website...Good info on breeding too! If you have a male and female, it seems that they like to breed during spring time. Look for little babies in the Java moss!

Only sure way of sexing is that males always have wrinkles behind their eyes. Some get a belly line, some don't, but they always have the wrinkles. If they are young, though, might be too early to tell.

if you can breed them that well, you could feed several puffer tanks.

A question to you, what kind of numbers am i looking at with 2 ten gallon breeders?

Congratulations Michelle.

Didn't fancy finding an Abei, it would have ripped through your snail population very quickly. j/k

Nice pick up.

LOL Hilly- That sure would have done the trick!

TFM- I stopped by that site a couple of times before making my decision, maybe I'll join up sometime. As for breeding little DPs- that would be really neat!

BM- I think they're too small to tell yet. I looked at all of the DPs in the LFS's tank and they all were pretty small and none had a belly stripe, but I think Zhi is a male- I think I can see very faint eyewrinkles. I guess time will tell.

Saynever- Well, with my breeder tank it is a lowtech planted tank with pond ('parasite') snails and ramshorns. The ramshorns bred like crazy, but the pond snails seem to breed rather slowly. I'm not sure if it is typical for ramshorns to be so prolific, but if you have any I'd be prepared for an invasion! If you do want a huge number of snails (I don't know how many puffs you have to feed) you will want to cover filter intakes with sponges or something similar so the baby snails don't get sucked up and killed. After I covered my filter intakes the snail population started to grow.

the reason i ask is i am setting up a 75g tank for a small school of south american puffers(thats the plan although i've been looking at other options, taking my time to figure out exactly what i want).

I am figuring either 2x10g or 2x20g breeding tanks for snails, one pond, one ramhorn.

With the advice of others on the board, i am gonna go with multiple sponge filters in each tank run off of one air pump(i wish i could afford a decent one but will probably just pick up a rena since they are rebuildable).

I am just trying to gauge the amount of snails i could achieve, and then decide how many saps i could feed. I'd like to keep 5-6 saps, but afraid of being able to keep their diet of snails...thus i've been shying toward 3-4.