What cleanup crew can be kept with puffers?

[SaltyMist]

Okay, I finally gave up on the idea of making my 20 gallon a reef tank since I fell in love with this Ceylon puffer and 2 green spotted puffer babies. So I returned my dwarf lion and had the fish store aclimate these puffers to full marine environment.

They seem healthy and full of life since I got them.

But they do seem to have an appetite for snails.

I had a red foot moon snail that I moved over to the real nano reef with the clownfish, and I had 5 margarita snails, but am down to 1 now.

I do have 3 or 4 red hermit crabs that seem to be too big at the moment for the small puffers to do any damage to, but is there any kind of algae grazer that I can get to put in with the puffers? The emerald crab does fine with the algae that grows on the rocks, which is almost non existant now, but now Im getting spots of green strandy looking algae on the glass thats really hard to scrub off with the magnet.

Any suggestions.

 

[Anonymous]

You do know that a 20gl tank is too small for these 3 fish ?
Anyway both the Ceylon Puffer ( Tretraodon fluviatilis ) and Greenspotted Puffer ( Tetraodon nigroviridis ) will grow to about 6". Their natural diet is crustaceans and as a matter of fact they need to feed on hard shelled animals to keep their teeth from overgrowing. So snails, hermitcrabs, and other tankmates are fair game as your Greenspotted Puffer gets larger.
They may be cute now but can become extremely agressive to other tank inhabitants.
I just checked to see if "Jen the Puffer Lady" was still around and sure enough here's a link to her site:

http://puffer.proboards2.com/

Regards,
David Mohr

 

[rayjay]

Razor blades work great. For the size, why worry about anthing else?

 

[SaltyMist]

Thanks for the tips regarding their size. Im not the kind of person that gets really attached to fish, they are living animals and as such I try to take care of them the best that I can, but I have no quarls trading in larger fish for smaller fish again.

Or I could setup the 100 gallon in the garage, but Im waiting till we move in Aug or Sept, or Nov of this year before I bother to setup that bad boy.

Thanks for the link, I know of this place, they have been very helpfull over there and I should have thought to post there about this first.

 

[fugucuts]

I have a fugu puffer in my reef tank for 1.5 years. I feed him only pellet food and he is like any other fish in my tank. Every once in a blue moon, I find a hermit half eaten which I assume to be the puffer. Not much of a problem.

 

[HClH2OFish]

I was under the impression that if you don't feed puffers 'crunchy' food, they can develop serious teeth problems.
Not sure abut the Fugu, but other puffers teeth keep growing and they need to be worn down with a diet that has crunchy things in it.
Our fishy vet had a puffer a few months ago that needed its teeth filed down as it couldn't eat properly.

 

[SaltyMist]

Yup, that is the case with all puffers I've read about. Generally speaking if a puffer is in a liverock tank, he'll also file down his teeth a bit by chewing on the liverock looking for little scraps to eat. My Ceylon wouldnt do this, but the GSP's would often chomp down on the liverock and you could hear them doing it, it was quite loud at times.

But yes, in general you do need to feed puffers something crunchy (snails, crabs, shrimp in the shell, clams etc) to keep their teet from overgrowing.