[MrGuyPerson]

Hi all. I currently have a 75g that is about to be outgrown by its current inhabitant (South American Lungfish) and I wanted to take a totally different direction with my tank. I want something low maintenance, with small fish and the El Natural set-up seems pretty cool. I've done some lurking for a while so I've picked up the essentials here. So my thoughts were to create a nearly self-sustaining habitat with shrimp, snails and dwarf puffers. I wanted to get the snails and shrimp established and breeding like mad and then introduce the puffers. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of set up and or dwarf puffers? Will the puffers (depending on how many I get) just devour all the shrimp/snails in short order, or could something like this work with a few puffers? Thanks!

-Ted

 

[CaptainNemo]

My guess is that you'll end up with just puffers. It only took 10 to eliminate all the snails when I had a 180 fully planted. I used to see them cruising by with a snail as big as themselves in their jaws. I'm pretty sure they'd eat up the shrimp even faster.

 

[gravy9]

This should be of some help.

http://www.dwarfpuffers.com/

regards,
Ravi

 

[Muirner]

Ravi - great link, trenac from this site is a mod there and she knows a lot.

Also, as said by capt. nemo i bet you have just puffers. I could feed one DP 10 snails no problem If you had a thousand in there maybe you'll have a shot, but you'd need to over feed like mad and hope eggs were laid in the thousands. your best bet is to have a seperate tank for snail breeding.

 

[MrGuyPerson]

Ok, maybe I'll scratch that idea. I would really like to have a slightly overgrown looking tank, so I would like fishes that like densely planted tanks. Also I wasn't sure how many plants I should plant initially. I've heard that I should plant rather densely but I wasn't sure about what this meant in terms of numbers. My tank footprint is the standard 75 gallon (18" x 48"). Any suggestions here would be welcome. This will be my first fully planted aquarium so I'm trying to plan ahead here.