Pea Puffer Care and Breeding: A Tiny Fish with a BIG Attitude!

hello everyone this is jason from primetime aquatics and in this video i am super excited to bring you the pea puffer we're going to be talking about how to care for it how to breed it it's something that we've had in our fish room for a while and a number of you have asked for this video hope you enjoy it thanks for being here so let's talk about a really cool fish and here we're looking at pea puffers we have two of them in this tank this is kind of an odd tank it is a 12 gallon long that is almost three feet long so it's it's an interesting size tank and one i think works really well for these fish now pea puffers come from india and the water parameters there are all over the place from slightly acidic to quite basic so anywhere from a ph of the low to mid 6's up to around eight maybe slightly higher now what's so cool about these fish i think there's a couple things that a lot of people find endearing about them and one is they're very small size the fish in this tank are absolutely tiny and the pea puffers are no exception they're going to max out somewhere around an inch maybe slightly more so they stay very small which means we have some options when it comes to tank size the other interesting thing is the differences between the males and females right now you're looking at a female and i'll show you both here but the males tend to be not quite as round a little bit darker and they have a very distinct line on their belly which i plan to show you as we go through this video the females as you can see here they tend to be more round a little bit lighter in color and their spots just seem to be a little bit more pronounced and so they're just really interesting looking fish now one of the things you have to consider with pea puffers and there's a lot of conflicting information out there when it comes to their temperament i would probably say that they are semi-aggressive especially towards one another and so we have to be very careful about the number of pea puffers that we have in any given situation in any tank but they tend not to be quite as aggressive with other fish in the tank depending on how you stock the tank and so tank mates are going to be a really important consideration when it comes to pea puffers something we're going to talk about in a moment now these fish it is a commitment they could live up to four to five years and so if you buy them expect to have them for a little bit of time now the tank mates with pea puffers there's a couple ways you can go a lot of people just do a species only tank and that can be a really nice idea and it can complicate things a lot less usually when that happens general rule of thumb is you'd probably want at least a five gallon for a single p puffer if you want to keep multiples it's best to have a male with multiple females and in that case you're probably going to want to keep a pair nothing less than about a 10 gallon tank now again here we've got a 12 gallon tank but it's unusual because it's three feet long and so our pair generally speaking gets along very well together they've been together for a long time you don't see any fin nipping or any issues there yes the male will sometimes chase the female around but beyond that there really isn't a whole lot of aggression towards one another it's a bad idea generally speaking to keep more than one male together in a tank especially when we're usually keeping them in tanks anywhere from five gallons up to twenty in that case again it's best just to have a male and multiple females or just get rid of the male altogether and just have the females now for other tank mates as i've mentioned already this tank is kind of an unusual mix we have some celestial pearl daniels we also have some lamp eye rasboras we have a super red bristlenose pleco in here and the interesting thing is yes we do have a large mystery snail in here that the pea puffers have always left alone i am not by any stretch of the imagination saying that is going to happen for you but for us it has worked out okay because we find for the most part the pea puffers will only eat snails that they can consume and the mystery snail is much larger than they are but again there is absolutely no guarantee that's going to work and in fact i highly recommend against doing that it just happened to work out in this tank so when you're choosing tank mates then we want to choose fish that are going to be small enough not to try to eat the pea puffers but yet fast enough to stay away from the pea puffers in case they want to chase the other fish around so the smaller rasboras the smaller tetras might be a good option because they tend to be fairly quick but please be careful a lot of this depends on the size of the tank so when i put tank mates in a pea puffer tank if it was a five gallon you run the risk of having some more issues there with this larger tank it tends to be a little bit easier to do things i would stay away from are any fish that are going to be slow moving especially any fish that have long fins pea puffers have been known to fit nip other fish so guppies and endlers might not be a great idea a lot of your live bears just generally speaking mollies and swordtails these are fish that you may want to stay away from you've got small tetras smaller rasboras amber tetras might be a really good option regular neons cardinal tetras black neons i've already shown you the fish that we keep these are all potentially good options now when it comes to how we care for these fish ideally you want your your water temperatures up in the upper 70s your ph again it can be anywhere from mid 6's to around 8 or so the big thing with ph is make sure you keep it consistent water hardness usually the most average water hardness will be fine we in our fish room we run about 10 degrees for both carbonate and general hardness which is somewhere around that 170 to 200 parts per million that's been working on fine you can go a little bit lower possibly a little bit higher when it comes to water quality you definitely want to make sure you have no ammonia no nitrites and we always try to keep our nitrates at 20 parts per million or less now please be aware this is a fresh water puffer they do not require salt they are not brackish water they are not salt water so just keep them in fresh water like you would most other tropical fish now before i go on i do want to say if you are looking for pea puffers and you can't find them around your area flip aquatics.com does have them in stock usually they are a channel sponsor and they do a great job of getting people fish nano fish and shrimp on time and they are a company that stands behind their fish so if you're looking for them you can't find them check them out online flip aquatics.com i'll put that in the description below now when it comes to feeding these fish here are some challenges one they typically don't eat prepared foods so you're probably not going to find them eating flake foods or pelleted foods what we feed our pea puffers are primarily a couple things one they will occasionally eat live baby brine shrimp they love snails we generally take small rams horn or common pond snails and kind of crush them up and throw them in the water and they will eat that you will see them throughout the video picking off of the wood and the rocks and everything and so we tend to have a little bit of algae growth in this tank and it really is for them because they will pick through that stuff and pick off small organisms that grow even baby snails you'll see from time to time they'll pick those off as well i would stay away from all types of invertebrates in a tank like this so a lot of people ask hey can i put neocaridina shrimp in a tank like this or like the mystery snails again it's working here i don't recommend it i don't recommend putting shrimp in a tank like this uh just because they could decide that that is a snack for them so snails live baby brine blood frozen blood worms frozen brine shrimp may also work but it might take a little bit of time to get them used to eating that other stuff i already mentioned the tank size i do believe a five gallon is a minimum for a single pea puffer a 10 gallon might work out better for a pair and if you want to have a male and even more females generally speaking there's a rule of thumb out there about five gallons per pea puffer that seems to work out fairly well again some of it depends on the dimensions of your tank you can see here how we for the most part have decorated this tank we like to have sand in most of our tanks for pea puffers i think this is especially important because if you're going to be feeding them live snails or crushed snails it can make a bit of a mess and so sometimes it's easier to get those pieces of snail shell or the uneaten pieces of snail off the surface of sand compared to when it sinks in the gravel because that can follow up your water which is especially important to consider when you have a smaller tank so we like the sand fine gravel might work but you can see here we've got lots of rocks and wood plants are in my opinion whether they're fake or real a must you see we've got some crips we recently redid this tank so a lot of the plants are not fully grown in yet hopefully we see this tank in six months and it is much more planted than we see it now but anubias crips java moss sword plants the java moss is especially important as we're going to see in a moment for breeding java ferns are good if you are interested in breeding your pea puffers you can set up a 10 gallon with a pear put some plants in there some java moss let them lay the eggs usually the male become more aggressive once that has happened now for us generally speaking with fish like this we often will remove the parents and just raise the fry and so initially the fry will probably start picking through that java moss if it's been well established there might be infusoria there microorganisms that can be eaten by them eventually they're going to shift to live baby brine that might take anywhere from five days to maybe even a week or so before they've gone through their egg sac once that has happened the live baby rhine is great eventually you can shift them over to small little pieces of blood worm and live or crushed snails now this is a great fish the positive side of things is obviously you've got a small fish with an amazing personality and their eyes move different ways and they're just very very personable for such a small fish they're also really great color you can keep them in a small tank which is cool but there are some challenges you do have to think very closely about what types of tank mates you're going to have the tank maintenance aspect really needs to be a consideration especially given the foods that they eat and how it can kind of mess up the water parameters if you're not staying on top of it but i highly recommend if you get a chance to try them it might be easiest just try them as a species only at first just remember if you've got multiple males you may have to remove some of those males to separate tanks before they start fighting because that can be a disaster if you allow them to stay in the tank and they start to duel over territory and females so i hope you enjoyed the video and if you did share subscribe and we'll see in the next one

Channel: Prime Time Aquatics

Views: 100,518

Rating: 4.9600997 out of 5

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Id: XyYQNa2KxAk

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020