New Fish Diary - Figure Eight Puffer

by Peter McKane
of England (currently living in Holland). From his website www.helpthefish.org
Aquarticles.com

Today there was a problem with one of the tanks in our house. This tank, belonging to the mother of my girlfriend, is 300 litres or 75 US gallons. It's the largest tank in this house and as such has a large external filter. However, due to neglect the tank has not been regularly cleaned, and the introduction of German blue ramirez cichlids has led to a complete degradation of the Indian ferns. As a result, the less than frequent cleaning has cumulated in a very sick female peppered corydoras and a nitrite level of nearly 160. This is, of course, fatal to fish. The peppered corydoras is now in an isolation tank being treated for its illnesses, which are mouth and fin rot.

So my previously unplanned morning became the rather arduous task of cleaning a very large tank that has not been cleaned properly in at least four months. Those poor fish, stressed out enough already from intolerable water conditions, only to be further stressed out by my arm rapidly siphoning the substrate. After five buckets, there was hardly a dent in the decaying plant matter at the bottom, and the rocks were proving to be veritable treasure troves of nitrite producing dead plant.

My girlfriend and I quickly came to the conclusion that while the external filter present and in use for the tank was certainly sufficient for flow and filtration in normal conditions, the unreliability of the tank cleaner meant that some drastic measures were required. We needed extra filtration and quick.

So, it was off to one of our favorite local fish stores, one that we know sells second hand equipment. Buying new equipment when we had not planned this rather large investment was simply not an option as budgets can only stretch so far before you start getting nasty telephone calls and letters from the people who really own your money: the banks. With a mind to be spending around fifty euros (around sixty to seventy US dollars) on a new filter that could handle the extra bioload for this tank. We were guessing that we would need a filter that could handle around a two hundred litre tank with a cycle of around five hundred litres per hour.

When we arrived at the store a short while later, we found that the store did indeed carry some second hand filters, but none were suitable. They were too old and worn, far too small or far too large and expensive, so we were forced to look through the new filter section. We came across a brand that I personally would stake the lives of all of my fish upon; Superfish. They are a "value brand" and even though their packaging lacks the professional polish of Eheim filters, I swear that they are as good as or slightly superior in their quality and efficiency. We found an internal filter that can actually handle three hundred litres with eight hundred litres per hour filtration. This is, by itself, enough for the tank that needed more filtration. Plus, there was a very nice surprise because it only cost twenty euros brand new with sponges and a guarantee. Considering the cheapest alternative was in the eighty euros region, we didn't let this sit on the shelf, grabbed it and checked it out.

On account of the fact that we were already in the fish store, we did what we usually do and gawped at the fish. This particular store is known for stocking puffers. This is not something that I generally approve of, especially considering the lack of puffer knowledge that the staff have. What we found were, amazingly, six figure eight puffers in astoundingly good condition. They looked well fed, were juvenile enough to not attack tank mates of the same species, and were curiously examining the people pausing to look into their tank or searching the plants for snails. This has to be the first time that we have ever found puffers in such good condition.

It is worth mentioning at this point that we already have a full mild brackish setup ready for when we found decent figure eight puffers for sale. We have seen them several times before, but we have never bought them because they were either improperly housed or sick. Fish stores should never be encouraged to cut corners because cutting corners means more money for them and sicker fish for the aquarists. We looked at the price tag… five euros. A pittance for such a beautiful fish that we had been waiting so long to find! Of course, a budget can always stretch just a little more…

We went to the sales assistant and asked, in clear language using small words, that the puffer should be caught with a net but not taken out of the water with it. Instead, we asked the sales representative to scoop the puffer out of the net with his holding cup, which he obligingly did for us, and then asked us why.

He is, evidently, unaware of my article Ten Things to Know About Puffers. First rule of puffer keeping, even before you get to the constant tank cleaning and over filtration is never let a puffer puff with air. At least nine times in ten this is fatal if a puffer fully puffs with air.

So, with our well transported puffer safely back home, we began the process of acclimatization. Because we are introducing this fish into a brackish environment, it would have been better to first keep the fish in a quarantine tank and increase the salt levels (or specific gravity) of the water by 0.001 per month. However, because this figure eight was nearly mature, ready to live its life in brackish conditions, and because the specific gravity of our tank is a mere 1.003, we decided to do a long introduction directly into the target tank.

Immediately after release this beautiful fish started to make a colossal dent in the tank's snail population. Formerly the snails had been something of an irritation as the only fish in this tank are five bumblebee gobies. Feeding such a small number of small fish accurately is difficult, and the snails were at least keeping the algae at bay while they were also cleaning up any surplus food.

They were. Now however, they are not, because they are nearly all gone a mere hour after the figure eight was introduced! He, or for that matter she, is swimming around in apparent puffer heaven. Its own sixty litre tank, perfect if slightly rushed water conditions and seemingly all the snails it can eat. If fish could smile, this little snail eating fiend would be grinning from ear to fishy ear.

And what became of the filthy huge tank? Well, we installed the filter and it surpassed all expectations. Within an hour you could see no dead plant matter anywhere in exactly half of the tank. The reason it is exactly half is because the power head on that filter is so powerful it has thoroughly cleaned the tank on the side where it is not, simply from the force of the current. Moving to the other side of the tank has reduced, in a matter of hours, the nitrite levels back down to a comfortable but not perfect twenty. As for the peppered corydoras, only time will tell.

All in all it has been a rather good day.