Does anyone here have experience keeping pea puffers?
Im possibly thinking of putting them in a nano tank and am looking for advice on aquarium sizes and stocking. I've heard it's 5 gallon minimum and that it should be species only.
Any advice would be well received. Anybody here keep them at the moment?
Cheers,
Matt
I'm also very interested in this answer, I'd like to keep them also. I had two good conversations about them during the recent Plantaholics get together when the Montreal folks came to town. Our first stop had a few of them and one of the guys from Montreal had 6 different species!
I have kept them in the past for almost a year. Fairly easy only down side is hard to keep up with food source since they only fed on snail and occasional blood worm. Not a shy fish at all. I kept a pair in a 10g with shrimp and snail. I didn't inject CO2 so have no experience in that area.
They would make fast work on your snails.
Sid just got them and they cleaned all his snail up.
I have 2 of them in a medium planted 6g with some cherry shrimp - suprisingly they don't eat the shrimp. I tried them with some Scarlett Badis originally... The basis all disappeared. They are pure freshwater unlike most all of the other puffers that are brackish.
2 in a 5-10g should be fine but you need a lot of foliage to break lines of sight. They'll kill each other otherwise.
Feeding is a challenge for the begginer. They only eat live food. I thought they could survive on a self replicating snail colony but they tear through them too quickly. My pair will go through ~50/snails per month. Now I feed with white worms, and a few snails here and there when I have enough in other tanks. They won't even take frozen bloodworms... If it's not moving they won't touch it.
Awesome little fish - tons of personality. Very entertaining to watch them hunt. They latch on and thrash like a pitbull when they get a snail, and they'll take on snails 2-3x their size. I've had mine almost a year. If you ever have a snail problem just rent a puffer!
Oh wow, so did they eat the scarlet Badis?
It's interesting because I have loads of snails and was thinking it would be a useful addition to the fish tank collection. But if they have to have other good too it may not be a great choice.
I agree that they must be very entertaining. They look super cool in the store!
I don't think they ate the Badis, but they probably killed them then the snails got them. I only ever saw some nipping. The tank at the time was so heavily planted it was hard to see what was going on - I just noticed numbers declining over time...