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a constant supply of live dwarf puffer food?


windeindoiel
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Ok so I'm setting up a 90 gallon planted tank, which will house a bunch of shrimp and hopefully about 30 dwarf puffers, providing they all survive, the ones I've been buying from petsmart don't seem to make it. That might be because the old male has been a lone fish for a long time, I suspect he may slowly be killing anyone else I try to add, or maybe petsmart doesn't have good dwarf puffers.

Anyways, it's my hope that maybe the puffers will breed. But if they breed I won't have the time or space to dig out the eggs and raise them in their own little tank and make sure everyone has enough food and that. So I'm wondering if there's any non-parasitic little invert that could possibly establish a colony in a heavily planted tank? That way maybe the potential little puffers will be able to find food and make it to adulthood.

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I would go with ramshorns... MTS have hella hard shells and the lil' puffs would never get a bite of anything, period. Red Rams like the ones I have only get about a fifty cent piece big, and their shells are fairly soft (even in a high hardness tank, I can crush them, myself). The baby snails are shell-less which makes them an eay one-recipe meal idea for tiny drawfs.

Only problem I can see is keeping the adult dwarfs from eradicating the tank full of snails in a few hours... no matter how many snails they have, they will try and eat every single one of them.

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My dwarf puffs don't even try for the shell - they just bite the foot right off. The larger snails survive this, and move around the tank w/o sticking too much of thier foot out.

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This could be why I've never had any luck with anything but MTS, which I'll still have in there for the gravel. Maybe I'll give other snails another try, perhaps with all the plants some can survive.

And maybe I'll go with cherries then. I once heard that if you keep different species of shrimp in the same tank they'll outcompete eachother until only one species is left, so does this mean I'll have to leave out the amanos?

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