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hi does anyone know anything about gestation periods for tropical puffer fish. How do you know if they are expecting and how long is the gestation period. Also how would a regnant fish behave? I have had my puffer for about 3 weeks and it seems to be getting fatter.

Depends very much on the species, its age and condition.We'll need to know these things.

You'll find very little change in behaviour most fish forage and do as per normal until a day or two before birthing, when feeding becomes less of a priority. Puffers are territorial and you may find a female may become quite vicious prior to laying. Sometimes you will witness a bit of pit digging in gravel prior to birthing. Often puffers pair up and males protect the brood, I assume the female may not be too vigilant in the absence of a male. Puffers dont breed that regulary in captivity, and serious fry cannibalism is common.

A lot of puffers take a great deal of time and effort to breed, often requiring brackish water for breeding to be successful apart from the few true freshwater species.Surprise gravidity is not common.

The swelling could be dietary, parasitic, or even osmoregulatory. Might help to know what sort of setup you have,water perameters etc and what the diet is so far, just in case you have a severe health problem on your hands.

hi, thanks for your reply. my tank is 100L with a plec and a cat fish in. the water is 0 for amonia and nitrite. the nitrate is 0.4 and the ph is 7.2. I am not sure how old the fish is but it is 1 inch long, and is a greenish/black colour with yellow and a white underneath. I feed it bloodworms every other day as per the aquatic shop advice. But it looks like it has a bump underneath just where there is a fin. It looked like this when i got it i just thiught the lump looked bigger now. The shop keeper told me she thought it was the healthiest specemin in tank.

Discovering precisely which species of puffer you have is very important, so that the correct level of water salinity is achieved for the species. Without it, the osmotic balance of the puffer will fail and it will die a very premature death. At already over an inch, its unlikely to be a true freshwater puffer, and may well require at least some salt or a fully brackish tank. Most plecs and other catfish cant take salt though, certainly not at a recognised brackish level, and so you may well have a basic environmental compatability issue.

The wrong level of salinity for any of your species could lead to deaths in anything from a few days to a few months. For a freshwater fish, regular salt in the water makes retaining liquid difficult,dehydration is possible, and this puts an immense strain on the renal system.If they have no glands capabale of expelling salt efficiently enough, as true brackish and marine fish do, they start to have problems with salt take-up, being fundamentally incapable from extreting or expelling it from the body.They can also absorb too much water and swellas the salt level in their body rises.

For brackish fish, living in freshwater means that they either cant source enough salt to stay healthy, or they get problems again with retention of water, and their tissues may swell. Brackish fish out of all the groups tend to survive the longest in the wrong salinity, but eventually they too often die from the complications of renal failure.They are usually adapted for low salt levels , and long term, the absence of salt, or an excess of it will cause them severe problems. They have tools for dealing with salt and fresh, but its a severely limited ability.

Marine fish typically collapse from being put in freshwater within a couple of days, or even a few hours.They cannot preserve their levels of bodily salt, and become hyperhydrated or utterly dehydrated in a very short time. The method of death depends very much on the individual biology of the fish fish, but marines die in salt free water the fastest out of any groups that find themselves in the wrongg salinity.

Puffers are also unsuitable for community for the most part, being they have a severe tendancy to bite chunks out of other fish sooner or later.

Dietarily, at one inch a puffer is easily capable of taking snails, and small whole shellfish, and pieces of shrimp, and it should be getting them. Puffers teeth will also begin to radically overgrow if not fed foods it has to crack open erode its teeth on. A puffer with overgrown teeth will starve, and clipping the teeth of an inch long fish is no easy business, so you need to get onto procuring some abrasive or hard shelled foods asap.

An exclusive diet of bloodworm will not satisfy a puffers nutritional needs, although in the short term they may cause it to gain weight quite radically, they are a fatty food. Long term feeding of an exclusive bloodworm diet will eventually lead to hepatic lipidosis and death by failure of the renal system.

You may well have a green spotted puffer, or a similar species, so if at all possible , post a piccy of the fish, or give the shop a call and ask if they have a latin name for the species. I think the ease of puffer keeping has been severely over-exaggerated by the people at your LFS, and whether it currently looks healthy or not to an inexperienced eye, I think were gonna need to address its care to save its life, and the lives of its cagemates. Puffers have the ability to cripple and kill surprisingly huge fish in proportion to their own size. Catfish are not off the menu.

Please come back with the info/pics as soon as possible, you may find we are up against the clock if the fish has liver damage or is suffering from osmoregulatory issues from being in the wrong salinity. The gut swelling you are seeing is far more likely to be osmoregulatory failure than pregnancy , or possibly obesity, and we'll need to move fast to try to correct it.


You might be able to pull off a save at 3 weeks, but leave it any later and it will be curtains for sure. Liver damage can be reduced, and the cause of damage ceased and the fish may yet outgrow some damage, but severe liver damage from fatty deposit is impossible to cure in a traditional sense, and its 90% odds-on a fatility will be involved. Its possible for a fish to live with partial liver damage for many years, but much as with humans, there is a tipping point when symptoms become so severe that nothing can be done.


If diet and salinity are not appropriate for the species, the two factors will both put weight on the renal system compounding the impact on the liver, and killing the fish quite quickly.

Then , just to cheer you up you may find that once the puffer is healthy, and living in a correct environment and eating well, it may become more interested in the finer aspects of its life, like hunting and territoriality, and then you will find yourself perhaps having to find a species tank for it. Either the puffers or the cats may well have to be moved from the tank at some point. Certainly if they require different salinities they will have to be seperated almost immediately for there to be any chance of survival.

Get the species identified by posting a picture here, or getting someone at the shop to give you the species info and go from there. Your shop may have just put you in a very difficult position, and caused you to mix species that dont go together.

Interesting, I never knew that puffers were livebearers...learn something new ever day!

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I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
~ Mae West

Eh

Who mentioned livebearing? They lay eggs and usually keep then in a pit for a few days till hatching They have a spot of fry protection that often wears off in no time, often parents are a risk to the young.

Mucho misconstruement

must be...

You'll find very little change in behaviour most fish forage and do as per normal until a day or two before birthing

when I think of an animal giving birth its not quite the same as laying eggs...

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I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
~ Mae West

Ah, that explains it, probably should have mentioned egglaying but I take birthing literally. Technically you could give birth to an egg, an egg sac, or a live fry I suppose. Apologies for any confusion