anyone have any ideas/successes/non-successes with trying to keep a clean up crew in their puffer tank? i was looking at getting a nice little clean up crew for extra food that gets thrown everywhere from them taking a chuck of food and spitting half back out in tiny particles. i want stuff that is mainly going to keep the top of my sand clean and something that will burrow in my sand and keep in there clean, i believe its the cerith snails? im not worried about algae on the glass cause i have a lawnmower blenny that is constantly picking the back pane of glass at the algae back there so i want to keep as much algae on the back glass as possible for him. i got one hermit crab by accident when getting saltwater ghost shrimp, dont know how the girl didnt see that she put it in the bag or maybe she didnt care. but that was months ago and he is still alive and wandering around the tank, climbing stuff, always out in the open and the puffers have never messed with him.
puffer tank clean up crew?
- Thread starter jus85411
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I have kept cerith snails with my p puffer some ended up a snack but most survived. I get hermits for $1 a piece so I used to throw in about 10 a month. I also had two very large turbo snails that the puffer left alone but the trigger killed one.
thats what i figured since their diet consists of snails and other hard shelled foods that will trim their beaks. i just thought maybe there was a little hope since the hermit crab in my tank has survived a couple months without getting eaten. i may try a small clean up crew, its not that i mind cleaning during water changes, i actually like cleaning the tank and making it look nice but between water changes i would like to see my sand a little more clean.
If you don't mind your cleaners becoming dinner eventually & constantly restocking them then go for it.
I kind of liked the fact that sometimes my cleaners went missing. It was his way of saying "Dude I was hungry so I ate something" it was reassuring knowing he was never starving.
i think i could not feed my GSP's for 2 months and they still wouldnt look like they havent eaten in that long lol. they are fat! i was sitting in front of my tank for a good half hour last night before i ate dinner and was watching my puffers keep coming up to the glass to look at me, they definitely seem to study you. but as im sitting there i notice my scooter blenny comes up to the front of the glass like he usually does, but for like 5 or 10 minutes straight his cheeks seemed to have a lot more purple on them and he starts flaring up his top fin and doing this shaking motion on the substrate while looking at you. its awesome to see. i love seeing him do this, but he never sat in front of the glass and did it for that long. almost like he was just trying to get my attention and steal the puffers spotlight. just thought i would share 
While keeping my GSP I had a similar problem earlier when he was a smaller and a much messier eater (now he devours things whole sometimes). I read up on ghost-shrimp and found out they cannibalize once in a while, so between the krill and live bait ghost shrimps that are left littering the ground, I would toss in a large amount at a time, and often enough they survived by eating scraps and the sheer number often helped them survive puffer attacks via confusion. As someone mentioned sometimes with puffers the cleaners simply become dinner, but that cannot be helped.
yeah i have been giving mine ghost shrimp since i have had them. i saw a youtube video of GSP's chasing around ghost shrimp and had to get some immediately, it was that amusing. so they have become kind of a clean up crew. the puffers seem to have stopped chasing them for food so there have been quite a few salt water ghost shrimp left in my tank for a while and like 3 or 4 of them are pregnant now too! the ghost shrimp have gotten ballsy, they are constantly out in the open searching for food and getting food when i feed.
Ghost shrimp work very well. So do Mollies, but avoid the sailfin & ballon types...They need to be pretty quick to avoid fin nips. After a week or so, my GSP's just ignored the Mollies.