The Puffer Forum

Hi there,

My name is Gunther, about two months ago I made a switch from normal freshwater to saltwater. My friend sold me a lot of his equipment along with a Green Spotted Puffer. Her name was Flower and she had been acclimated to full marine conditions she was about 5 years old at the time. Unfortunately my Flower somehow managed to escape and was found on the ground. I put her back in and she seemed to be doing fine the rest of the day, until that night I realized that she had somehow gone blind. The next day I had to put her down seeing as her body was breaking down from all the stress. Anwyway, long story short, after being upset for a couple of days I bought a baby GSP. Happy as I so call it is barely an inch long. Now here is my problem. I don't believe that I can trust acclimate the little one right away to full marine conditions, but is there anyway that I could as long as I did it really slowly? Please answer back.

Thanks,

Gunther

Well, the truth is, there hasn't been enough long term study yet to know how it will affect them by putting them in full marine at a young age.

We do know that brackish raising up to higher end brackish/full marine as they age is better than freshwater or low brackish for all their life, but so far there haven't been enough people who have tried full marine from the get go to say if it will affect them long term, good or bad.

If you acclimate it really slowly, its not likely to do any immediate damage (as it it will keel over dead within a day), but it may not live as long as one that was moved through increasing salinities as it aged, or it may live longer.. we just don't know yet.

I do believe a few members have started out young GSP's in full marine, maybe they will chime in on how its going for them.

Jillybean, my Shakespeare's cospecific, was bought at 1" long and acclimated from nearly FW to marine over about an hour. She's been doing well and more than doubled in size in the few months since I've gotten her. I'd say your puffer will be fine, Jilly was, but I'd worm the new fish with something like flubenol-15 before adding it to the big tank since SO many GSP catch internal parasites at the distributor.

I would suggest acclimating for much longer than an hour though, if at all possible.

Thanks for all the advice. As of now it's been about two days worth of acclimating, so she'll probably be doing fine, I'll keep you all posted.