Fugu Puffer - Need help!

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Pyramid_Party

Pyramid_Party

Fire Eel
MFK Member
Aug 6, 2008
4,916
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Monterey, CA
So like a noob I made the mistake of buying this puffer without research. Right now I have it in a 20 gallon long. I was reading info on the web that says this species is brackish or marine. But there is some conflicting info too. I found info saying these species are hard to keep and die easily. They made it sound like it is impossible to keep them alive. It also seems like all the sites you get hits for on bing/google all recycled the same info. So I am hoping to find someone here who has 1st hand experience with this species and could provide me info. Please, only people with real experience, if you are gonna go do some google searches that is pretty useless I could and have done it already. Sorry to sound blunt about it but I find the web sometimes useless I prefer to hear from those with real experience. Thanks
 
Not firts hand experience with this Puffer.

It is marine and grows considerably.
 
Yeah I don't think I can take it back. If I have to add salt I don't mind. It is a pretty active, good looking and aggressive fish. It likes to hide in the sand too. I read one source that said they need cool temps as well in addition to salt. I could have swore there was a member here with a full grown one of this species.
 
I have seen 2 species being sold as FW: Takifugu Niphobles and Takifugu Ocellatus.
Both are 100% SW as adults. You may find some people who keep adults in their SW setups, but you probably won't find many (if any at all) who have brought juvies from FW to BW to SW. This is why they are difficult to keep, and a lack of success means little to no literature through these stages.
I purchased a T. Niphobles as FW and tried to bring it through the stages, but failed.
Good luck.
 
I believe I have the second species you named. I saw figure 8's and green spotted buffers and passed them up because they require salt. And it turns out the one I did get requires it too. Any info on how you tried to acclimatize them to salt? What level were you trying to achieve ultimately?
 
Take a picture of it so we can see what we are talking about, Fugu basically means "puffer" and is rather generic term as used in the aquatic import fratenity and we raised a 1/4 inch fugu to at least a 12 inches before we left the UK for Canada in Freshwater (Takifugu Obolongus to be precise)... some adult marine puffers are coastal and can flourish when young in fresh/semi brackish...
 
I have never kept T. Ocellatus, so I can't say too much. If I recall correctly, it is a subtropical species and will require cooler temperatures. Just make sure to make the change from FW to SW slowly.
With my T. Niphobles, I was increasing SG .002 every 4 days or so. It was a few years ago and I don't remember exactly what the SG was when it died.
 
I had 1 a long time ago that I grew to about 10" in pure sw. I started it off in fresh since that's the water the store had it at but everytime I did a wc, I replaced the water with pure sw making the tank very lightly brackish. I just repeated this step every week when I did wc's until the salinity was at 1.024. The temp ranged from 78 during the winter to 85 during the summer. It gets really hot here in Cali. I also fed it a lot of worms shrimp and clams on the half shell.


Sent from my iPhone using MonsterAquariaNetwork app
 
Pyramid_Party said:
Not my pic, but the fish looks just like this:



View attachment 1009603
Click to expand...

Thats an orange banded or peacock puffer... Takifugu ocellatus....

We managed to get the only one that survived the transport (batch of around 30) last week. Its does not like high temperatures, 20-23'C and is Brackish to full marine as adult.. we are slowly increasing the salt level as it came in fresh water (spawn's in FW).

Eating bloodwork, mysis, mini shrimp and shrimp eggs. so far so good. They is not much positive data on keeping them longer term. We had two in the UK for over six months in FW before we moved.
 
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