Green Spotted Puffer Excretions ?

[blibdoolpoolp]

hello I am new to this forum.

I wonder if anyone else keeping green spotted puffers has seen this, and is it what I think it is?

I have two beautiful green spotted puffers in a 30g brackish tank. I have had them for four years and they are close to three inches long. I have done my best to adequately research the care and feeding of these little guys. I have even trimmed their teeth!

*ahem*
On extremely rare occasions, one of them appears to ejaculate. This usually happens at feeding time, ribbons of a filmy white substance explode out of the back of one of the fish. It looks like hand lotion, and sometimes there is a LOT of it. The stuff hangs in the water and slowly dissolves and vanishes without a trace. Unfortunately I have no photographic evidence, as it always catches me by surprise and doesn't last long enough for me to fetch my camera.

is this puffer trying to spawn? I'm no fish expert but I have kept a variety of species of freshwater fish over the years and have never seen anything like this in other species.

 

[nmonks]

At three inches, I suspect your puffers aren't quite sexually mature, but there's really not much evidence either way. GSPs have been spawned, but only very rarely. Males attract females to nests, they spawn, he drives her off, and then he defends the eggs until the fry are free swimming. All pretty cichlid-like, really.

Somewhere I've heard that they spawn in the sea, but I can't recall who said that and where they got it from, I'm afraid. Perhaps some time on Google will yield results. It was established via lab work, where the two GSPs species are quite widely used for genomics work.

In any case, I've never seen any male fish shed his sperm (technically, called milt where fish are concerned) for no apparent reason. If there's spawning behaviour involved, that's fabulous, and make a note of what happens because it's really very, very rarely that aquarists breed GSPs. Otherwise, it's probably simple defecation, possibly associated with certain types of food. Since GSPs in the wild eat a wide variety of foods including plant material and fish fins, you'd perhaps be wise reviewing diet, and augmenting as required, perhaps with cooked peas and small pieces of white fish (whole lancefish are ideal).

Cheers, Neale

 

[blibdoolpoolp]

In any case, I've never seen any male fish shed his sperm (technically, called milt where fish are concerned) for no apparent reason. If there's spawning behaviour involved, that's fabulous, and make a note of what happens because it's really very, very rarely that aquarists breed GSPs. Otherwise, it's probably simple defecation, possibly associated with certain types of food. Since GSPs in the wild eat a wide variety of foods including plant material and fish fins, you'd perhaps be wise reviewing diet, and augmenting as required, perhaps with cooked peas and small pieces of white fish (whole lancefish are ideal).

Cheers, Neale

Usually they have just plain brown poo, the white stuff is kind of extraordinary when it happens.
I give them frozen bloodworms and live snails from my other tank (clever me). When I can get them, I give them some live ghost shrimp. Sometimes they eat bits of the green algae that i have to keep scraping off the light. It resembles the sheets of seaweed you get in miso soup. I've tried giving them vegetables like raw cucumber but they don't seem interested. I'll try giving them peas.

Thanks for the info!