Recent New Tank

I just wanted to share my experiences with my most recent new tank. I recently bought a 48"x18"x15" tank. Mainly I needed to transfer my Redeye puffers from the tank they were in to this bigger one because they were overcrowded in the other. Then I would move other puffers about to give them more room, etc. Originally I had planned on doing this step by step, letting it cycle slowly, but things never seem to go to plan for me.

You see, a few weeks back I bought male and female Congo puffers (T miurus), and they can be a little bit nippy towards each other. At first they seemed fine, but then it started that at feeding time the male would hog all the food and not allow the female to get any.

Not only was he depriving the female, but he was eating so much food that he was unable to swim right. I really thought he was going to die it was so bad. I withheld food for a day, allowing him to recover and I thought he might have learned his lesson, but no. As soon as I fed them again, he did the very same thing. Besides that, she was getting very paranoid around him. I had heard that sometimes the males really beat up the females.

So I started thinking .....
If I moved my Redeyes into the new 4-foot tank, I could move my Hairy puffer (T Baileyi) into the tank they vacated, and then I'd have another tank vacant - so I could separate the Congos.

So I set out to get my big new tank up and running as fast as I could. You have to be very careful with puffers because they do not have scales and are very sensitive to ammonia and nitrate. Normally puffers should never be added to an uncycled tank, and I would not suggest anyone do what I've done.

Luckily I had some foresight and I had 2 filters running on the Redeye tank, so I moved the one filter (Shark ADV600) to the new tank, as it had built up bacteria in it and would help out the cycling process. The new tank came with a Fluval 304 external filter, but it didn't work, something wrong with the impeller.

Thankfully I had bought an extra external filter because our other tank uses an external filter too and I bought the other as an extra in case something went wrong. I had that one to fall back on.

So I had my Shark ADV600 going on the new tank, plus the Fluval 303 external filter. I bought some of that bacteria boost and added it to the external filter, although I have no idea if it helped. I also added another internal filter to the tank (too much filtration with pufferfish is never a bad thing). I knicked a mature filter sponge from my community tank (the water parameters are perfect), cut it up and put it in the extra internal filter. I also had my husband clean the external filter on our community tank and I took some of the water from inside that filter and poured it into the new tank. I also did a partial water change on the community tank and all the water I took out of there I poured into my 4-foot tank.

We got it all going and after a few days I took readings. My nitrite is "0", and my ammonia is "0" !!! It's been 18 days since I first put water in my new tank and now I have all my puffer fish (13 of them) in there and 3 Rasboras ... so a total of 16 fish, oops 17, forgot about the upside down catfish that's been living with the Redeyes since I first got them. I rarely see him but I know he's in there!

I was able to move my Hairy puffer into the tank vacated by the Redeye puffers, and then I was able to move the male Congo puffer into the tank vacated by the Hairy puffer. So all is well in the puffer house.

I now have a total of about 55 puffers in all, 9 different species and still looking for more!!

But that's my success story of cycling my tank SUPER QUICK. As I stated above, I would not suggest anyone try doing this with their puffer fish unless you're willing to sacrifice the fish's life.
But I do think it's a good idea to use mature filter sponges to get a new tank going, as well as using some of the water from cleaning your mature sponges (from another tank), and even using the water from another tank to a degree. I ended up putting half the water from my community tank and half fresh water in my 4-foot tank.

So that's about it.

Thanks for sharing that. Some people run one or two sponge filters specifically to use in setting up new aquariums. By filter, I mean a hunk of sponge with an uplift tube. Most of the on line aquarium shops sell them.

Yeah I've got one of those in my brackish tank for my Green Spotted Puffers. I try to give more than enough filtration for my puffer tanks, they are messy eaters.