[mikeylikesitny]

I've had the weirdest puffer for a year now. He will NOT eat the shrimp or
snails in the tank. He will NOT even eat the clams unless I break a small hole for him. He loves flake food and pellets. I try to keep him away from that and encourage the clams for his teeth grinding but my problem is this: everytime I put in a clam, the hairy black algae grows crazy.
I got 10 snails (turbo & i forget) to eat algae, but they couldn't keep up or didn't like it, and they did not multiply at all like I heard they do, and most are dead. Any ideas? I'm thinking of breaking open
snails to feed if they don't produce algae.
I heard of feeding silverside or shrimp. He will eat dead store shrimp, but the membrane on silversides & shrimp are not very hard if I could bite through without MY teeth grinding down.

 

[Pasfur]

This topic is far to complicated for anyone who is not an expert on Pufferfish to discuss. I am not the person you want to help you with this.

So, here is the link you need:
Small Puffer Dentistry

 

[cerianthus]

Unfortunately, we can never exactly dup what takes place in nature but to try our best. I have not noticed any complications in reference to teeth when mostly fed Fz krill, prawn, silversides and other fz prep food cubes.
One thing I done was to rub fz cubes on the dead coral skeleton for them to pick/graze. Wether this helped with their teeth, I do not know.
I also would collect clusters of mussel from ocean and have used themin the system to filter my water where new baby mussels will pop up from time to time on the LR in the tank (breeding during Full Moon Cycle??) which will come and go. Wether eaten by puffer, I do not know either.
Like I said, never experienced complications with just about all the puffers avail to trade by feeding Fz foods..