There is a picture of the new set up with all of the plants and the three Dwarf Puffers, soon I will be adding three Khuli Loaches and two Ottos to the tank, hopefully on Friday or Saturday. Everything looks great right now and the fish are all healthy, but unfortunately things didn't start so smoothly...

I wandered into a small local pet shop called Clark's Feed here in Bellingham, Washington where I go to school at Western Washington University with the goal of getting a beta for my dorm room while my roommate was going to get a goldfish. After looking around the tanks I saw the DPs and instantly fell in love. I watched them with their small eyes darting around the tank and saw how small they were and thought it would be a great idea to get some for a small tank and set it up in my room. I even went as far as to call my girlfriend and ask her if she had any problem with me getting a tank started.

When I returned home I did some researching on the Internet about the fish and found my way to dwarfpuffers.com which I highly recommend to anyone that is looking into getting into Dwarf Puffers. After getting the new tank and all the necessary equipment for the new fish, I returned to Clark's Feed and talked to one of their employees about what kind of substrate I would need for a new planted tank and how long I would need to let the tank cycle. He informed me that they had had great success with Eco-Complete which was supposed to come with all the live and necessary bacteria of a tank that had been cycled for three weeks. I was quite skeptical about how it could be possible to get a cycled tank in 24 hours without having to use fish or anything else, but in the end I tried it. The fish store people talked me into getting five puffers, even though I knew that was far too many for the 10 gallon tank I had set up. I figured that some of the fish might be weak and die so maybe 5 wouldn't be such a bad idea.

After the first couple of days it became evident that something was wrong. The fish were in their new tank, but they had become skiddish and hid all day at the bottom of the tank with little to no activity. I started doing large water changes and one of the poor puffers had died after only a few days. The largest of the new fish had internal parasites and died shortly after that as well. Two down, three to go. I was quite upset over the loss of two of my new pets so I invested in a master test kit and found that my ammonia/nitrite/nitrate levels were all high and probably caused the deaths of my new fish. I began doing 20% water changes three times and week and after only a few days of using 3 drops of Prime for each new gallon of water, everything went down to zero and everything was great. There was a very noticeable difference the behavior of the fish and I was able to get a better understanding of each of their individual personalities.

One of the fish was just plain mean. We eventually ended up naming this fish Achilles, mostly because my girlfriend was reading the Iliad and commented on how Achilles had chased Hector around the city of Troy three times before killing him. Hector soon became the name of one of the other fish, the smallest of the three in fact. Ironically, I'm quite sure that both Achilles and Hector are female, but the names are too perfect to change, my one male is very dark and clearly has the telltale "wrinkles" of a male Dwarf Puffer he also remains nameless for now. Achilles was so mean in fact, that I ended up going to the fish store and buying three more larger plants to fill the empty spots in my tank so they the littler guys could hide better. Once I added the three new plants (compact sword, foxtail frill, and a crypt) the fish have become much more friendly to each other. I have not yet seen Achilles chase either of the two fish around the tank like she used to, and they all seem much more happy having large leaves to fall asleep on.

This weekend I plan on getting three Khuli Loaches and two Otto Catfish for my tank, the Khulis should be fine with all of the hiding that I have and the DPs love so much. The Ottos should love all of the plants, they have to be loaded with algae by now. I also have a blossoming 1 gallon snail jail full of snails, I can't wait for them to breed so that my main tank can get some snails in it for the DPs to hunt.