Poorly Puffs

[xgemx]

hi,
im not sure if any of you can help but ive looked it up and cant find much about it. i have 2 green spotted dwarf puffer fish, i have had them a few weeks now and they were fine until a few days ago but now they are curled up and have turned a dark colour (which ive read is signs they are stressed, ill etc) they also look like they have been sprinkled with salt so im thinking white spot but just wanting to know if anyone elses puffs have had it and treated it sucessfully and what with? all the water parameters are fine, been checking them everyday with test strips. hope someone can help as they are looking very sad.
thanks, Gemma.

 

[iSnail]

Hi Gemma, sorry to hear about your poorly puffs When you say Green Spotted Dwarf Puffers, do you mean the brackish GSP or the freshwater Dwarf Puffers??

It sounds like your puffs have got ich (Ichthyophthirius), the white spot disease. I don't have first hand experience in treating white spots but I read that adding aquarium salt and turning up the heat together with water changes helps. It does take a few weeks to eradicate all the parasites and spores. Hopefully someone more experienced comes to your rescue soon. Good luck.

 

[DarkEntity]

Get some photos up or give us an ID as to whether its a Dwarf Puffer or a Green Spotted Puffer. Once thats done we can advise best course of action for housing the very sensitive Puffers. If its whitespot then do half doses of meds as they are a scaleless fish.

 

[coldmachineUK]

Hmm...it won't let me post an article which is available elsewhere on treating ich in puffers. If you go to the (edited) and then click on the "Learn" link, and then on the "Library" link, and then on the "Hospital" link.
It's fairly bad not to be able to post links to useful articles on other sites...why are they being censored?

It would help to know what puffer you have too, as people say:

Does it look like this:

Or like this:

I'm guessing it's probably the latter? Dwarf puffers (Carinotetraodon travancoricus)?

To keep two green spotted puffers together you would need a minimum of 60G (really, that's a bare minimum) and they're also a fairly aggressive puffer so it's not something I'd personally risk doing. They also need high end brackish conditions and are far more difficult to keep...

Let us know which of the two it is so we can help

The reason the address of the other forum is censored is because of previous troubles with members from there coming to this forum to post links in order to raise their own membership numbers. At this forum we do not allow web links to other sites which are deemed as competing for membership without permission from the moderating or admin staff. CFC

 

[pica_nuttalli]

those pictures will look mighty similar to someone unfamiliar with what exactly they should be looking at.

here's how I tell the difference between Dwarf Puffers and Green Spotted Puffers (GSPs): is it the size of the first knuckle of your littlest finger? then it's probably a dwarf puffer. and even if it isn't, at that young of an age, it can be treated as a freshwater puffer anyways.

Dwarf Puffers will not get any bigger than an inch in their whole lives. They are super teeny-tiny. If you have a puffer that is already bigger than an inch when you bought it, then it probably isn't a dwarf.

 

[xgemx]

thanks for replying everyone but sadly they have died

 

[DarkEntity]

Which Puffers were they?

 

[coldmachineUK]

those pictures will look mighty similar to someone unfamiliar with what exactly they should be looking at.

You simply can't base an identification on size alone, unless you know for absolute certainty the age of the fish in question.
I would have thought the differences were fairly obvious: for a start the black spots are rounded on the GSP, and they're irregularly shaped on the DP. Anyone not able to tell the difference between those two pictures probably shouldn't be keeping puffers in the first place...

thanks for replying everyone but sadly they have died

Sorry to hear that it was too late for anyone to be able to help