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Had the last of my dwarf puffers die overnight,presumably of old age, the others are long since dead. Unfortunately the four siamese flying foxes in the same tank mustve scavenged the corpse remains becuase all 4 which only yesterday were fit as they could possibly be were stiff as boards.This is the first time ive failed to notice a puffer corpse before it was eaten, and to be honest I didnt think the other fish wouldve touched it anyway, but it turns out I was wrong. A few other fish and shrimp were unaffected, but all the same I did a major water change and stabilised the water with chemicals and swapped out the carbon filtration.

I liked those flying foxes, they had personality.

Poo.

Bloody dwarf puffers, theyre even trouble after they die.Never again.

um intresting my flying fox eats all the fish when one dies and is never affectted. but maby it is only with the puffer. sorry to hear u lost the foxes as they are great!

Heh... I've never heard of aquarium fish learning the hard way about the dangers of fugu.

If these were the SAEs you posted pictures of, it really is a shame because those were some nice-looking fish you had there.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

yeah it was four of the twelve, they were all pretty much identical.Still got the other eight, but it was a damn shame anyway.
Tetratoxin is one of the deadliest poisons on earth, but given that most fish can sense it, I was very surprised they ate it. I suppose I can console myself that the end was probably a fairly painless and quick paralysis.

um intresting my flying fox eats all the fish when one dies and is never affectted

Most puffers are extremely toxic. That's why there's so much risk to eating puffer meat. Not a good idea to let fish eat dead fish anyway since there's a very good chance they will catch whatever the other fish died of. One thing I do like about having tons of snails. They wipe out any bodies generally within minutes and usually don't contract or help spread diseases. Plus even if large numbers of snails did die from eating something they shouldn't I wouldn't really care. Fewer snails I have to remove during the next water change.

Tetrodotoxin accumulates itself most notbly in the liver of various toxic tetraodontids. However, it is very specifically an oral procedure by which the fish gins its toxicity. Thus, captive-raised puffers hve significantly less in the way of tetrodotxin in their systems than their wild analogues, and captively bred fish, along with fish that have been in captivity for any significant period of time (the NIH scouted at about 6-7 months after being fed on a non-poisonous diet), are not toxic at all. Perhaps, then, either your fish were poisoned by some other bacterial toxic extruding from the dying/dead fish or a bug's just going around. I've had puffers (murius, occ, and asselus) die on me before and have been nibbled at by various scavenging fish, and have not yet experienced any notable cases of what might be construed as tetrodotoxin poisoning. Or perhaps the diet you're feeding them is harboring the potential bacterium necessary for the formation of the toxin, which is equally interesting. Whatever the case, sorry for your loss.


Btw, IMO, if you're looking to feast on takifugu, you might as well wait for several months before feeding the stuff to your customers, however, apparently, Japanese palettes look only for the "Freshest fish", catch wise, to feed to their customers. Furthermore, apparently, it requires subsequent non-toxic feeding to dispel the tetrodotoxicity form the animals system, and japanese shopkeepers do not regularly feed their animals. How silly.

Tough loss, LHG. No matter what the cause of their demise it always a real downer to lose fish, especially when they are totally healthy one minute and gone the next.

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

A follow up. Keen to investigate , I took the frozen corpses to my local college (i occassionally used to attend lol) and a friend there , also a lab technician was grateful for research purposes to do me a complete autopsy and toxicology report.

Found out a couple of things : The toxin from the puffer did kill all four fish , much as I expected, so no surprises there.

The other bit that was surprising was that that in the course of further study a PHD student was doing into fish fertility, they discovered that both the 2 females and 2 males were fertile, and that eggs were in full scale production at the time of death. That means if I had been able to rescue eggs earlier, I would have been one of the first people in the world to breed SAE 's successfully in captivity... the group was working..

Damn , damn , damn, damn ,damn!!!! BLOODY PUFFER!

Thankfully I still have 8 related specimes left, I shall endevour to crack a breeding attempt with them.

That's pretty awesome that you have those type of resources available to you at the college. Hopefully, with a little luck and perseverence on your part you can get your others to spawn. Good luck with it.

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

I just saw a tank of green spotted puffers yesterday and it said toxic in big bold letters with an ! after it. I thought it kind of odd. Yea there's a potential if the fish is eaten but otherwise I don't see how it's an issue with little puffers like that. I suppose it at least makes people want to do more research before getting them instead of just tossing them in their current community tank.

Hahaha, perhaps its a warning to those idiots who like to eat aquarium fish (remember those threads about a year back?). Personally I think such people should be encouraged to eat raw whole puffer fish.