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All, Fish/Invert Profiles, Green Spot Puffers Leave a comment

Green Spotted Puffers (Tetraodon nigroviridis)

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If you’ve ever decided to look further into green spotted puffers (GSPs) than just noticing them at your LFS, you’ve probably run into a large variety of conflicting opinions and professional recommendations alike. I, unfortunately, am not here to declare definitive stances on anything, but rather to share what I have learned in my own experiences owning one, then two GSPs over the last two years.

Side/Front Pic

Side/Front Pic

Firstly, GSPs sometimes get mislabeled in fish stores. True GSPs, Tetraodon nigroviridis, when healthy have the following appearance traits:

  • bright white bellies
  • a neon yellowish lime colored top half that gets reflective and brighter on top of their “head”
  • dark black, round spots all over their greenish portions, with some overlapping near the boundary to their white portions
  • Puffers often change color to match their surroundings, and some just seem to change color. I’ve never seen anything this drastic in my puffers, but this person’s puffer has the ability to alter its coloration dramatically.
  • They’re not going to be puffed up like a giant round ball unless under extreme stress. Without having to be a huge, spiky ball, puffers are still pretty round fish
  • Two eyes on either side of their head that can move independently to look around. These stick out of their heads a bit, and you can see the motion of their individual eyes changing their lines of sight.
  • Teeth. These little puppies got teeth. This impacts their diet, because their teeth don’t stop growing.
  • Two small side fins and a tail – all a translucent pale green.
http://aqualandpetsplus.com/Brackish%20Water%20IV.htm

From above – notice these guys have torn fins 😦

Puffers are really curious and endearing. For all their known aggression with other fish, they have many ridiculously comical traits that make them seem harmless and endearing. Puffers often “blimp” around, pretty much hovering in place with fluttering side fins that look too small for their large bodies. Sometimes they’ll just stay exactly in place while slowly curling their tail toward their side, causing them to spin in a perfect little circle. Then they’ll see a snail across the tank.  One sudden sprint later, they’re biting through the shell and sucking out the inhabitant in one swift moment. Then they’ll watch you watching them from the other side of the glass, deciding whether to come toward you to get more food or to wait cautiously for you to move first. Some puffers are attention hogs who will swim to the glass immediately to meet you, while others are cautious and easily spooked. But all of them seem to be really adorable.

Teeth - Too long!

Teeth – Too long!

Though most people tend to be drawn to GSPs when they see them and think that they are quite cute, GSPs are not common pets because of their high difficulty of care and stringent tank requirements. You pretty much seem to need GSPs in their own tank, else have thirty or so gallons of water per GSP. This is a lot of aquarium space for a single fish to need. Furthermore, they need good quality water to actually be healthy and grow. Yet this is difficult to maintain with a GSP because of their enormous bioload and inability to utilize plant growth for filtration given their changing salinity levels throughout development. So, you’ll need to make sure you have the tank over-filtered with good flow throughout the tank. Regular water changes and substrate vacuuming will be especially important – meaning GSPs are high maintenance fish. Oh, then there’s their absolutely required special diet. Since these protein lovers don’t really chew on anything unless they’re eating, you need to feed them hard foods (snails, crayfish, clams) that will wear down their teeth. And when you’re not feeding them that, most won’t take anything less than frozen bloodworms, freeze dried krill, defrosted or live shrimp, or other such ‘meaty’ foods.

Before you take a GSP home, do your research on these fish. While they can be rewarding creatures to care for, they have lots of quirks that commonly sold freshwater fish do not. Go read through many different websites about GSPs to hear many opinions. Learn to interpret your GSP’s individual signs of stress and aim to find what seems to make your GSP  as calm, curious, and brightly colored as you can get them. Some of the websites I visited and still visit at times when I have a question or concern are thepufferforum.com,  myfishtank.net, this hubpages.com site, or other such sites I find from googling various names for the GSP (like GSP, Tetraodon nigroviridis, green spotted,…) and terms about the questions (like teeth, pale, help,…). For more general, beginner info, sites like fishbase.org’s pageor seriouslyfish.com’s page would be decent starting sites. If you want me to add a suggestion, let me know or put it in the comments for me to add.

Here is my GSP Jake:

Is it raining bloodworms?
Such a bright spot on his head!
Chewing Break while curling up
Ooo, is that a snail?!
Oh hai.
More food!!

Normally, two GSPs in a 20 gallon is a bad idea, but my first, Jake, was an extremely shy fish. After eight months of researching and incorporating attributes of successful GSP habitats and tanks, Jake was still extremely shy, easily frightened, and rarely seen. He would occasionally get spooked by a ghost shrimp that snuck up on him. Jake was so passive that the ghost shrimp began breeding and multiplying in the tank with him. Yet his appetite an coloring were great. I tried adding more hiding spaces, breaking more lines of sight, adding more swimming room at various water levels, changing substrate, adding more filtration, adjusting water flow/turbidity, adjusting pH (they like higher pH than average), adjusting the lighting, changing diet,… I finally decided that another GSP would be my best bet. This would also let me see if Jake’s behavior was exhibited by a second GSP. If two GSPs both had Jake’s irregularly shy and skittish behavior, then the tank setup would have remained a probable cause. Thus came Finn:

Just woke up – still getting his colors back!
Starting to Perk Up and chase down a snail (not hard to beat a snail in a race…)

So to Jake’s tank, I added Finn. Finn originally followed Jake everywhere in the tank, with Jake mostly running away. I almost brought Finn back that first day because images of Jake suddenly going all Ozzy Osborne on Finn’s fat little face if he got too fed up with it. Within an hour or two, Jake and Finn had settled and were napping a few inches away from each other peacefully. Jake has become much more active and social, and the two seem to get along wonderfully. They are both still less than half their likely final size, and I don’t expect Jake and Finn to live happily ever after together in a 30 gallon tank. Within the next year or so, I plan on either upgrading them to a larger tank, or, more likely, only keeping one and moving them to a 33 gallon (or larger) long, rimless tank.

I plan on doing a post in the near future on creating a beautiful tank without using live plants. Since GSPs need a higher salinity than most freshwater plants tolerate yet a lower salinity than marine plants can tolerate, GSP tanks are very difficult to plant. Maybe once I have figured out freshwater better I’ll give it a go, or wait until they are mature enough to do a full marine planted tank, i.e no corals. In many ways, the GSP tank has been harder for me to decorate as I would like, so it has gone through many different iterations and changes. I have some decent pictures of at least four different GSP setups that will be the subject of a future post.

1 Gallon - Walstad Jar, All, My Tanks 1 Comment

Single Gallon Walstad – My First Walstad

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1 gal Dec 2013 2

I wanted to try using the Walstad method on a smaller tank just to give myself an idea of how everything would work out. If you’re not familiar with the work of Diana Walstad, check out some of these links: Aquarium Wiki, Amazon Page, or Aquariss Interview. In its most basic form, you first need to put down soil, which gives the plants all of the nutrients they need and gives good bacteria and small organisms places to thrive. However, soil on its own in the tank would result in too high a concentration of nutrients diffusing into the water column, causing algae blooms, toxin level spikes, and generally making the tank brown and muddy. So, you need some sort of a “cap” material to put over the soil – usually sand or gravel.

Many people setting up their first Walstad run into issues with air bubbles breaking through the cap, spewing soil into the water. Others have trouble figuring out the right depths of materials to use, or have trouble planting. Basically, there are many potential pitfalls when using a multi-step method for setting up a tank, and I wanted to run into them with an easily manageable tank that I wouldn’t min destroying.

It took me two tries to get the material depths decent, and I learned that it is a lot easier to wet your soil before putting it in the tank. This way, fewer air bubbles form, and the soil can be used to aquascape the terrain to some extent. I used dark sand rather than play sand. As I mention in the post about preparing a quarantine tank in a moment’s notice, I always keep extra seeded filter media on hand. I also used water and plants from an established tank along with some Tetra SafeStart, so the tank was effectively cycled pretty much immediately.

The second day I did a 50% water change, mostly to remove tannins, and refilled it with water from an established tank. Then I threw in some snails – Ramshorns and Malaysian Trumpet Snails – to eat any decaying plant matter and stir up the substrate.

After a week of growth and testing levels of ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates to ensure all really was well, I added some red cherry shrimp. These shrimp had come from my 150, so many had reverted back to wild-colors (browns mostly). I did water changes weekly, and topped off the tank if it looked low. I also threw in three chili rasboras. Chili rasboras are often mentioned as being territorial and needing tanks of 10 gallons or more. After seeing aggression issues play out with my pygmy gourami, I wanted to see how these little rasboras would interact before I began planning a tank for them.

Here is my mini-walstad after a month of growth:

1 gal Dec 2013 4

Here are the full tank specs:

Tank – One Gallon Anchor Hocking Heritage Hill Storage Jar, available here

  • NOTE that smaller tanks are much more difficult to maintain and keep balanced. I was using this originally as a trial tank, and I have a good deal of experience by this point in caring and maintaining freshwater tanks. I recommend beginning with a much larger tank as your first. If you want to go with something small like this, then please do not add anything more than plants until you are sure the tank has cycle fully and is stable.

Filter – AZOO Mignon 60, available here

  • Walstad tanks usually do not have filters. I used one to originally cycle the tank and keep up water flow. I later removed it, and the tank did fine for the last month before I dismantled it to make room for a larger Walstad bowl.

Heater – Aquatop Nano Aquarium Heater with Thermostat, NH-15W, available here

Lighting – Ikea Black Jansjo Desk Work Led Lamp Light, available here

Substrate – Miracle-Gro Organic Choice Potting Mix, available here, capped with Carib Sea ACS00821 Tahitian Moon Sand, available here. The sand winds up being almost shiny, which I wound up not liking very much. It is a very nice dark black though.

4.12 Gallon - Blueberry Shrimp, All, My Tanks 1 Comment

4.12 Gallon Aquatop Tank – Week 1

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Here is one of my newer creations in its beginning stages. I plan on moving around some of the plants once they’ve developed root systems and could take being replanted while maintaining their health. I also will be adding a baffle in front of the filter. I have a small Azoo filter with variable flow on the tank right now. I want to keep it at higher flow in preparation for when I add the blue berry shrimp for which the tank was planned. That will be another post in the near future!

Anyway, here is the tank in its initial stages. I’m still not sure if I want to remove the rocks entirely. I found these in my backyard, but it was difficult to find stones with enough detail and similar color, texture, cleavage, etc. I plan on having the front be a carpet of HC in the middle with grass on the far sides. Once everything has grown in (which will take a few months) I might add a valley of sorts filled with gravel or smaller stones to help create depth within the tank. Separating the gravel/small stones by size, then using the smallest near the back and largest near the front can really make the tank look much deeper than it really is.

Here’s a more complete rundown of the tank right now:

Tank – Aquatop 4.12 Gallon Cube, Low-Iron High-Clarity Glass, available here

Filter – Azoo Mignon Filter 60, rated for up to 3.5 gallons, available here

  • Note: I added extra filter media, and the tank will be heavily planted, so this filter should be fine. It is in place mostly to add water flow to the tank.

Substrate – Fluval Shrimp Stratum, available here

  • This is my first tank using this substrate. I’ll keep you posted on how it works. So far my initial reaction is similar to most reviews you will find of this product. It’s very light weight, so planting is difficult. It’s also pricey for the amount compared to other substrates. I love it’s texture though, and it seems to be working well with the plants so far.

Lighting – Dolphin Curve Pure White 6500k LED, available here . I really like the light so far, and will be adding a full post with a review of it soon since I can’t seem to find any thorough reviews for this particular light fixture.

Heater – Aquatop Nano Aquarium Heater with Thermostat, NH-15W, available here

Plants – see the diagram below with labels on each plant type. (Click to make full size, same goes with all pics on this site)

Plant Labels

The background rotala indica and watersprite are actually much more full and dense than the picture shows due to the filter. Note to self: for future tank shots, shut off the filter flow for a few minutes! I’m big on making low maintenance tanks though, so instead I plan on adding a plastic baffle that will direct the water current toward the front of the tank, rather than sideways along the background plants.

I also keep floating plants in all of my tanks. It began after I tried my first Walstad tank. Diana Walstad’s Ecology of the Planted Aquarium was an enormous help in how I have designed all of my new tanks. She stresses the importance of variety in tanks to create balance. Floating plants are great at removing toxins and excess nutrients from the water column. They also help diffuse light that might be too strong for some plants, and provide a great home for beneficial bacteria and microoranisms that keep tanks healthy and balanced. In this tank, I have duckweed and salvinia spangles. Right now, without the baffle, many of them keep getting pushed down into the tank and caught in the background plants. Can’t wait to fix my water flow problem…