The Puffer Forum

My buddy gave me around 500 of them can a 4-5 " fahaka eat them?

I would never feed them to mine.

I'll get rid of them

too late it ate about 5 of them

It is very possible your fahaka could chip/break it's teeth on them.

isn't it possible to crack the snails open before feeding them? just like what people do with cockle shells etc. or is it just so little meat inside it's not worth the trouble?

They're pretty tough.

which ones are the malaysian trumpet snails? i feed the cone shaped ones to mine?

the cone shape one's are MTS

I've found that I can crush the shells pretty easily of MTS with a pair of pliers. The hard part is to just apply enough pressure to crack the shells and not crush them completely.

Not sure I understand the point of that. The point of feeding them snails is so they crunch the shells and wear down their teeth. If the shells are crushed so they can eat the meat more easily, it pretty much defeats the purpose of them in the first place, no? And why risk their teeth when there are safer alternatives readily available? My fahaka has never sucked the meat out of a snail, he eats them shell and all. I would never risk his teeth by giving him MTS.

My puffer still does a lot of crunching even after the snail shell is cracked. The point of cracking the shell manually is that once the cone-shaped structure of the MTS shell is weakened, it seems easy for the puffer to break up the rest of the shell into little pieces.

I've read where RTR lost a puffer from eating an MTS. But nmonks has said that he thinks the risk is low from puffers eating MTS. I respect both of their opinions greatly, so this is my way of a compromise. I plan on raising some ramshorn snails in my community tank once I thin out the MTS population so the ramshorns won't get out-competed for food.

I personally wouldn't feed a puffer these knowingly and I agree with Boxer that if you are cracking them then it does somehow defeat the object of giving the teeth some work to do. Clooney had no trouble with them when I had a few in the tank but once he killed them off I never thought of feeding them to him. I do think though that a Mbu is an exception here in terms of jaw/teeth strength, they are damn strong :*

are mussel shells alot softer then? i presume there is no risk for my fahaka breaking his teeth on a mussel shell? they seem really hard to me.

they are a bit thinner I think, do you open the shell slightly?