How Often Do You Feed Your Puffer Fish...

[timmystood]

I'm just wandering if i'm over/under-feeding my Figure 8 Puffer Fish. They both get frozen food every morning.

How often do you feed your Puffer fish (not just Figure 8's??)

 

[Fella]

It's a difficult medium with puffers I find. I think in the wild they eat little and very often, but it's obviously difficult to replicate this in home aquaria.

With my puffers that sit around all day (EG, fangs puffer) I feed a reasonable amount every few days. With my irrubesco and SAP puffer, I feed little (1 cube of bloodworm for the entire tank) every 1 or 2 days.

With F8s I would feed little and often. Small amounts every couple of days, of varying foods.

 

[timmystood]

My Puffer's are weird!! When they eat every morning they go mental!! I fed them this morning and have just fed them again this afternoon with live Bloodworm (because i'm away for a few days) and their not touching it! I can't find one of them and the other is dark and hiding! (like he does sometimes)

 

[apester]

I have dwarf puffers and they are very hard to feed. I think they eat snails so I put a lot of snails in the tank. I mostly feed them with frozen bloodworm but it can be hard to feed them more than 3 times a day. I haven't found any food other than bloodworms that they will eat. If anyone has any recommendations that would be great.

Thanks,
Ape

 

[timmystood]

Well Ape... I don't know if it is the same with Dwarf Puffer's as F8 Puffer's but mine get fed;

Froozen Bloodworm, Daphina, Tubiflex, Black Mosquito Larve (sp?), Chopped Mussels and Ghost Shrimp. Also, they get the occasional live bloodworm! As well as snails!

Hope this helps!

 

[nmonks]

Fella put it very nicely. Pufferfish in the wild graze continuously. What they eat is primarily shelly, so can be thought of as being "poor quality" food (what biologists call food with a high ash content, i.e., a lot of indigestible stuff). What they do is fill up with poor quality food, poop out most of it, and have to extract what nutrition they can.

In the wild we do the opposite for them. We give them high quality food. While they quickly get all the nutrition they need, their instinct to feed continously is very strong, and for that matter to gorge themselves while they can.

Most fish only need a tiny amount of food. Because they are cold blooded, they mostly need energy for growth and repair. Warm blooded animals use something like 80-90% of their energy for maintaining a constant body temperature. That's why a snake can get by on one mouse a month, where a cat of the same body mass would need one or two mice every day.

It's almost impossible to underfeed a fish. A two-inch pufferfish (I would guess) needs only one or two small snails a day, or 4-5 bloodworms.

Cheers,

Neale

 

[joelovesfish]

Fella put it very nicely. Pufferfish in the wild graze continuously. What they eat is primarily shelly, so can be thought of as being "poor quality" food (what biologists call food with a high ash content, i.e., a lot of indigestible stuff). What they do is fill up with poor quality food, poop out most of it, and have to extract what nutrition they can.

In the wild we do the opposite for them. We give them high quality food. While they quickly get all the nutrition they need, their instinct to feed continously is very strong, and for that matter to gorge themselves while they can.

Most fish only need a tiny amount of food. Because they are cold blooded, they mostly need energy for growth and repair. Warm blooded animals use something like 80-90% of their energy for maintaining a constant body temperature. That's why a snake can get by on one mouse a month, where a cat of the same body mass would need one or two mice every day.

It's almost impossible to underfeed a fish. A two-inch pufferfish (I would guess) needs only one or two small snails a day, or 4-5 bloodworms.

Cheers,

Neale

Neale- what about frozen brine shrimp? My f8 and green-spotted both love it (for now until I can get my hands on small snails), and I'm cutting very small pieces off of each cube, thawing them and feeding at least 3 times a day. Am I on the right track?

 

[kevin mcmullen]

It's a difficult medium with puffers I find. I think in the wild they eat little and very often, but it's obviously difficult to replicate this in home aquaria.

With my puffers that sit around all day (EG, fangs puffer) I feed a reasonable amount every few days. With my irrubesco and SAP puffer, I feed little (1 cube of bloodworm for the entire tank) every 1 or 2 days.

With F8s I would feed little and often. Small amounts every couple of days, of varying foods.

Sorry to jump in, but I just got a harry face puffer recently and am having a hard time finding info on him, i get info on other puffers, but i'm worried we were told from lfs to feed him once a day frozen beef hearts or frozen blood worms which he ate great for the first 3-4 days but now all of a sudden he didn't eat yesterday or today. just lays on the bottom not moving much

 

[Colin_T]

Hi Kevin and welcome to the forum

You are better off starting a new thread because this one is from 2006-2011.

If you have a newly set up tank, then the filter has probably not cycled yet. This means there is no beneficial bacteria in the filter to keep the ammonia and nitrite levels at 0.

Ammonia is produced by anything that breaks down in water, be it fish food, waste, dead fish, dead plants, etc. The ammonia builds up and kills the fish. Meat based foods like beef heart, bloodworms, prawn, etc produce more ammonia than dry foods.

You best bet is to reduce feeding to 2-3 times per week and do a 75% water change and gravel clean the substrate every day until we work out what is going on.
Make sure any new water is free of chlorine/ chloramine before it is added to the tank.

The following link has information on what to do if your fish gets sick. It is long and boring but worth knowing. I recommend printing it out and reading it in bed to help fall asleep.
http://www.fishforums.net/threads/what-to-do-if-your-fish-gets-sick.450268/

Basically, reduce feeding, do big daily water changes, test the aquarium water for ammonia, nitrite & pH and post the results in numbers here, post pictures of the fish.