Freshwater Pufferfish: Tetraodon nigroviridis
Common names: green spotted puffer, GSP, spotted puffer, leopard puffer
© Freshwater Pufferfish
Activity level: active/hunter
Adult size: ~6 inches
Life span: 10+ years
Min tank size: 30 gallons
Temperature: 74-80 degrees F
pH: 7.0-8.3
Salinity: high brackish-marine
Diet: Hard diet of mostly crustaceans. While your green spotted puffer is a baby-sub adult, you can offer them a regular diet of snails, shrimp, and a variety of frozen foods, like blood worms, brine shrimp, and krill. As adults, you can branch out to foods found at the grocery store, like whole shrimp, crab legs, mollusks, and clams. As an occasional treat, you can offer your puffer red wigglers, ghost shrimp, and other types of feeder insects.
Notes: While green spotted puffers are not freshwater pufferfish, I felt that it was important to include a species profile for them. Many pet stores sell GSP as a freshwater puffer, which is unfortunate because they make great aquarium pets – provided that their basic needs are met, like the proper level of salinity in their environment.
It is very important to incorporate a large quantity of hard shelled foods into your green spotted puffer’s diet – their beaks grow at a relatively fast rate, and as a result, they need to be continually filed down. If you don’t regularly feed them hard foods, like snails and whole shrimp, then your GSP will slowly starve to death unless you manually file their beak down.
Green spotted puffers are very active fish that require an interactive environment to thrive in. If they are not provided with enough stimulation, they will continually “glass surf” – in other words, they will swim up and down the glass out of boredom. They are considered an aggressive fin-nipper, and should not be housed with tank mates.
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what if the tank is too small? what will the signs be?
If the tank is too small, you will risk killing your puffer because the tank won’t be able to handle the amount of waste excreted – ammonia spikes happen very quickly in a small body of water. Generally, if you have to ask if the tank is too small, it probably is!
A puffer that doesn’t have a large enough tank will most likely pace the glass frequently – some puffers may act the complete opposite though, and become lethargic. You will also see secondary signs that are a result of poor water quality, like ammonia burns, fin rot, etc…
I have a puffer fish that I got from a pet store approx. 4 weeks ago..His/her tummy is no longer white and is kind of grayish…I have been feeding it frozen blood worms ( that I defrost in a shot glass w/tank water) and some nusiance snails that keep breeding in my other tank…his tail is kind of curled and I have been doing regular water changes and I add aquarium salt to the water….he was beaten up a bit at the pet store from some other puffers…what can i do?..