mountaintoppufferkeeper

@Cheryl P. I have a little experience with puffers. I would try any species below 10" adult size in a 65 as a single specimine and would expect anything below 6" +/- adult size could be bred in a 65 given the right conditions and pair/group dynamics. I would look at spotted congo puffers, hairy puffers, congo puffers, red eye puffers, or any similar sized puffer I like for a 65 gallon. Ive done Pao cf palustris breeding in a 75 gallon but they are likely doable in smaller volume. Normal colors male has a white belly with patterning females lighter green and more yellow belly. Male Spawning colors same male as above and one of the females above. They pretty much reverse color from normal patterns. F1 pao cf palustris fry I keep a group of three hairy puffer in a 50 gallon and will breed those in a 50 once I get a pair between that group and my group of four still growing out in a 35 gallon. I am growing out Tetraodon miurus congo puffers and have plans to try a redeye project like Carinotetraodon salivator.

good luck on the dragons they are a cool looking fish

So i found this guy at the cone feeder today. I believe its a lack of pigment but only on the mid flank both sides. Pie-bald ish. There are a few with this higher pink / less pattern that have shown in this F1 batch. They eat and have grown similar to siblings so far. Could be a weird phase or fatal mutation but it looked to neat to not share.

Your results will be great to hear about. Thats pretty interesting with the short hatch time. I bet they eat quicker than the pao as well. They are a bit of a bottomless pit when growing. They easily eat 1 or 2 times their weight a day for me up here. Huge food bellies then a few hours to normal size bellies and repeat. I am a fan of the "puffer cam" i have used the 24/7 video camera on tanks for a bit. You can often set a motion detection zone to get alerts and then go back and check and through the full video on the SD card. This is from a wyze cam and shows one of the female pao cf palustris displaying to the male in the cave just before spawning. My motion zone was just the cave and the grey rock to the right of it. That zone allowed me to only check the activity where they were spawing and skip the stuff outside of that area. The breeder box top left holds a batch of fry from a few weeks prior. The smaller fish in the background is one of the cull platies I used to tidy up the place from the puffers eating. The camera I have is harder to get close up detail on but is good enough to see what is happening with the adults. It was only about 3 feet away for this recording. It would be interesting to see the differences between the two once determined. This is an awesome thread.

@Anttwon So cool. Congrats again!! Id guess the hatching timelime js different from the pao species based off that. Id assume similar to the pao they will be around 48 hours until the finish the yolk sac and start thinking about food. The mekongs its more of a look thing. Once i see those eyes its pretty quick. I have noticed that they will hatch over the course of 2 days or so in my set ups. When I pull from the male I wait around 48-72 hours or so from the time i note the eggs in the cave or from whenever the eggs to darken up if i missed them being laid. I let him to do all the work of fanning and removing bad ones for me.

Update to update COOP powerhead with an intake sponge, output into a flexible hose then 3/4" pvc. I did the pvc bends over the stove using the salt method dean demonstrated for the indoor pond build. 4 exposed 1/4" outlet holes ; I zip tied some of my fish bag liners to block the extra holes i did but I have the option to expose as many or as few as i need along the back edge of the pvc as i want. Centered on the PVC "U" is a coconut hut for a little more cover. Next up darter purchase

Update. Using the battery saver setting on the coop airpump running to a medium sponge filter for a little filtration and movement while prepping for the darters order in a few weeks. Hung off the "bear deterant fence" (keeps them from climbing the porch normally) Temporary residents are a pair of Highland swordtails to help get us seasoned up and functioning as a system ehile keeping any bug larvae down

You might be a NERM if you stumble across anything and your first thought is I bet that would make a great (anything) for or as a tank or pond: dog pool pond Polycarbonate soup containers now tanks. from resturant supply store and sitting on resturant dry storage shelving

My goal is to track down a supply of these straight wall 150 CC / 5 oz jars and modify them for my uses. Anyone know what these are called /normally used for before adding the holes in? Its the best puffer "cage" for shipping ive ever seen. Ive given a bit of time to searching in resturant supply lanes and the typical online retailers. It is a white HDPE? straight wall single wall jar with a flat cap. Maybe a lab container of some sort. Its almost a short opaque ketchup bottle. Cap and jar threads Visible Bottom markings "150 cc"and "P"

I drain through a sieve, and rinse them out of the sieve into a container with tank water using a bulb eye dropper. Less salt water in the puffer fry tanks but also probably not necessary. I also have the idea in my head that that the first drain of BBS probably also gets a good portion of ammonia out of the hatch.

Thanks @Odd Duck. the yellow vs white is a bit of a difference in my mekong groups along with patterning on the belly. I defer to the spotted congo experts on this one I have onlybhad one years ago. Posts and videos by @Preston John are my go to reference for spotted congo puffers he is a great resource for that species. I believe this thread below will help you

Interesting. More a java moss than a pea gravel guy for this application. Should be a fun project to document

Thats a pretty sweet 1/24th scale slot track too.

@Fish Folk Im sold on darters and the spraybar. Slight followup consult: Say a pufferkeeper you know decided to upgrade to a 47"x12" foldable dog pool pond for this project. If it holds up its a 70 to 90 gallon seasonal pond that folds back up for winter storage. water temperatures 53⁰ to 62⁰ on this set up and will remain the pattern in the june chart through early September or so. A little duckweed, driftwood for structure, bare ish bottom currently, plus aspen leaves and some pretty decent pollen and bug donations to the system. I am considering water lettuce etc for better cover, and a portion of daphnia to seed it a bit food and filtration wise. May even just do potted plants of some sort submerged in a plant holder and try the @Dean’s Fishroom salt method to curve pvc for the spraybar along half of top inner edge of the pond. If i do that id cap the end anf just drill holes after it firms back up to have a directional flow across the pond. Do you expect Etheostoma zonale would do better than E.caeruleum or other darters in that set up?

Gotcha. Hopefully the range of respinses for options in one or the other or both helped a little. Did you decide on your 20 upgrade?

My current test for a pond is a "foldable dog pool" . 47" diameter 10" ish of water depth (+/- 80 gallons). Drain plug can be unscrewed to drain down the slope when closed down for winter. It folds up to basically 4" thick or so and one panel wide and tall. (Wet dirt was from an argument with the hose early in the filling process it jumped out) they run $20-$40 depending on diameter. I have no idea if it will work but i do plan on getting either a combo of fry and learning experiences or no fry and way more learning experiences than I wanted from it through september.

I havent kept green spotted puffers but have experience with groups of hairy puffers, miurus congo puffers, and Mekong river puffers both F1 fry groups and an adult colony. I imagine I could come up with some advice. What is the bullying behavior you are seeing? Does it happen just with one food ? One solution i have done for a temporary fix is using the egg crate style lighting diffuser to split the tank in half so they can still see and smell each other but not be able to touch. The second one ive done is to feed on both ends of a tank and essentially train each puffer to eat at a station

@nabokovfan87 i have not seen that in my tanks before. Could be specific to pea puffers id be interested to hear if pea puffer keepers like @eatyourpeas @Jennifer V have experienced this issue with theirs. @HalJHave you tried feeding live food daphnia baby brine etc just in case its bound up?

I have never fed the shrimplets special foods but normally they will feed off the bacteria. I feed adults pretty much everything and supplement that with bacter ae or similar fine powder they can pick at as they grow.

If I am not enjoying the process I don't do it and sometimes find something else to replace it. In the fish room I generally keep some sort of new project going every 6-12 months or so because that is how I keep up my enjoyment. This weekend is setting up a 47" diameter x 12" high folding dog pool as a daphnia pond experiment. I am looking forward to seeing how that turns out along with the new group of 2" hairy puffers just added to that not yet successful breeding project up here. use lots of live plants, and bigger water volumes by doing over flow sump systems in a rack on most tanks I have. This limits my need for heavy water changes or longer maintenance days, I use auto feeders to make sure everyone gets a set schedule of a set portion of mixed dry staple foods, and use timers for my lights. The fishroom tasks that are not automated are mostly optional. I don't really need to rinse filter media or change water for 14 days or so but I often do so every week ish. I also run a temperature regulated faucet. When i do change water its a matter of a fraction of a second to get the water temperature where i want it for refilling. The lack of a need to do things that are labor intensive too often really takes the stress out of the equation for me and keeps it all much more enjoyable, With the exception of feeding fry when I decide to raise them, I mostly only watch the tanks daily and note behaviors of everyone to myself then do optional feedings of worms, shrimp, crayfish or frozen foods when I am down there and the room runs itself otherwise. I have left on a vacation for 17 days with no issues to any of t he tanks. I just did my 25% water changes skimmed some of the floating plants off the surface, rinsed the sponges out, and refilled the autofeeders. Fry feeding, if it were an all the time thing ,would be a job for me, an enjoyable job, but a job nonetheless. The most stressful portion of the fishroom is if i ever ship anything out in trade etc. It always takes a long time to get completed and is much harder than I think it will be when I am working at it.

Basically. This is the one that monitors my pond for me i ran acfoss it when it was something like $12. I got it a couple of years ago. Really anything bluetooth with an external temperature probe would work. There are many out there with more features these days Close the temp probe is the key part for the water temps. I do use that one linked for the fishroom. I use it to keep track of humidity mostly. But it does air temp, relative humidity, dew point, and vapor pressure deficit. That last one i guess is the difference between the water vapor pressure at saturation and the actual water vapor pressure for a given temperature. Theoretically a more accurate RH measurement

Its a "bluetooth temperature probe" for a smoker grill etc. They are those metal spike deals you stick in whatever you are cooking in a smoker etc so you csn see its tempersture without letting the heat/smoke out. Its probably unnessary but I put it in a ziplock / fish bag to keep the water off it. I figure it lasts longer if i do that. They are all basically $10-$12 and use one AAA battery to power the bluetooth part of it. Some new ones have audible alarms for preset temperatures so you could have it alarm by your tank/ pond if it exceeded a preset temperature you set in the app. Like if a heater failed in the on position.

I do a coop medium sponge filter currently and have the airstone with the felt disks in there with light flow and big bubbles. I havent noticed a daphnia die off from that bubble size up here. This is a container dipped in randomly from the top and through the duckweed. There are probably 50 in the container Here is a still Here is my temperature history for the past 24 hours from my bluetooth tempersture probe. They have a 20-25⁰ temperature swing every day with their max around 6pm and the minimum around 6am

Muck bucket "pond" catapa leaves, duckweed. Natural light Inside for winter 10 gallon polycarbonate tank newest version will be a 47.5"x10" unused foldable dog pool pond. Not yet set up.

here's hoping. Genetics is not something I've payed with yet - the variables in the puffers should be a fun thread if it all works out