Dwarf Puffer in a little tank

[Artuk]

Hi,

Currently, my tank is at my gf house. This is great, we share the hobby, but leaves me feeling like I am missing out when I am at my home where I work. I was thinking it would be very very cool to get a very small three gallon eclipse tank and try putting in some plants, some snails, and a dwarf puffer.

Does this seem feasible? What kind of snails should I get and how difficult will it be to strike a balance of snails vs puffers / plants. I was thinking I could keep a small tote aquarium for breeding snails in lettuce or some such.

Anyhow, looking for questions and comments about a small puffer species tank.. or maybe just point me to a relevent post.

Regards,

Artuk

 

[MAM]

as long as you just have the one puffer in there, and good filtration, that should be fine. becasue its a small tank, and puffers can be sensitive to poor water, clean it well and keep the water in check. i keep two dwarf puffers in a five gal (using a filter meant for a 10 gal), with no problems. give him lots of plants and a maybe a little cave ro other place to hide. as for snails, keeping the spares in separate tank might not be a bad idea. he'll need some once or twice a week. just the small nuisance snails that come in on plants and that you often see taking over fish shop aquariums (i get mine free that way from places liek petsmart and petco that don't want snails taking over their tanks......... ask around) will work, think small snails (dwarf puffers have small mouths....). you will need to feed him more than snails though, frozen foods like brine shrimp (as a treat), blood worms, tubifex worms, mussel. they also enjoy that sort of thing in the live variety, mine liked feeder ghost shrimp too.

 

[Artuk]

Thanks for the info!

Regards,

Artuk

 

[flyhockey1037]

put a couple of zebra danios or something hardy in the snail tank just so that the bio cucle keeps going and so the snails always have something to much on. put in a little extra food then u normally would also, a little bit of algae would be a good thing in a snail breeding tank.

 

[LiquidLife]

I have two dwarf puffers next to my desk in a 3 gal. Eclipse. I'm no longer using the Eclipse filter because the current was too strong for the puffers (they were constantly in hiding); I took the Eclipse filter out and stuck in a Small World filter and now can watch the puffers live. They have lots of plants and I keep a constant supply of live daphnia in the tank so they can eat them at will. And I keep a supply of ramshorn snails (pond snails if I ever find any) in the tank too--put in more about every week. They seem to be able to kill (and eat) snails up to about 1/2" big. The snails don't really reproduce fast enough to keep up with the amount of snails the puffers eat--we've got about 10 containers (more really) with daphnia and snails but it takes the snails awhile to grow to maturity and then lay eggs, and then for the eggs ot hatch and the specks of babies to grow big enough to be puffer food (in other words, the only time snails seem to proliferate is when you don't want them to). They get white worms or grindals or blackworms a couple times a week. And once they start reproducing, they'll get grammarus (scuds) and small shrimp too.

 

[bulldog188]

3 gal is very small for 2 dwarves.. they should really only be kept 1 fish to 2-3 gal!!