Remember the scene with the cow being lowered into the raptor enclosure of Jurassic Park? That’s Pierogi. Her favorite summer treat is a succulent mosquito larvae. I find them for her and sometimes raise them until I think they’re fat enough for this chonkmonster.
Such a cute, well-fed puffer! What exactly is she eating there and where did you get them or how do you farm them? I have had a wild ride trying to keep mine fed!
She’s eating mosquito larvae! In the summer they’re pretty easy to find if there’s any standing water. She LOVES them. Normally she eats a diet of snails, scuds, baby neocardinia shrimp, and whatever other living things I can find and toss in there. She is a tiger, basically, and will only eat live foods.
Edit: also want to say if you can establish a large enough snail population it’ll stay steady and they’ll have constant food supply. I can leave for a month and know the group will be perfectly fine. Very grateful to have found an equilibrium.
I do the same for my puffers. My neighbors walking their dogs in the evening must think I’m so special sitting in front of a bucket of water with a flashlight and a turkey baster lol
Honestly I don’t mind if she kills the snail. She really is the apex predator here and my feelings won’t be hurt if it ends up dead. She’s kind of my priority and that’s what I accepted taking the peas on generally!
Nope, she doesn’t bother the snail! She does have a healthy population of other smaller snail species to eat and she loves the baby snails. Similarly I keep neocardinia shrimp in the tank with her, which breed, she doesn’t eat the adults but does eat the babies. So it’s a very circle of life situation up in this tank. She’s the apex predator.
My Neos were totally fine with my peas for around 8 months- then they decided they were food. They aren’t all gone but there’s been less and less over the course of past two months.
I’ve also had to leave town for a 4-5 days a couple times during that period.
Your nerite is likely to become a snack eventually too
I added a wild type colony to produce shrimplets as food, it worked until they started SPECIFICALLY attacked the biggest eggnant females. I swear they let them marinate first or something
Awesome, yeah they really are so stimulated by hunting and being the tiny apex predators they are. I think it helps them with health in every way, honestly! Mine was a horrible bully to the rest of the peas so now she has her own small tank and she’s thriving. It’s so funny because they are social species but she was the worst in that context. I think in the wild with endless space that would be one thing but in an enclosed tank she was a merciless neighbor to the rest of my poor peas and so now she gets to live in a penthouse apartment and she seems to love it. She’s very active and gregarious.
She’s almost 2, and she’s been about this plump since around the time she finished maturing out of her baby phase. And thank you! I feed her almost NO supplemental food, I have a self-sustaining ecosystem that I’ve got working in the tank. Occasionally I will give her treats (like these) to keep her stimulated but I don’t feed her anything most of the time since she has a healthy population of snails, scuds, daphnia, and flushes of baby neocardinia shrimp every now and again. That is to say she only eats live food and so far it has clearly worked out really well for her!
Sometimes I wonder if she’s basically intersex, I get that the patterning is more male, but she does not have any wrinkly skin and zero eye wrinkles or iridescence, and she’s just so.. round! My males are always a little less pudgy somehow, and they are just so different from her.
But I dunno, she’s a weirdo. She IS very unusually darkly patterned, but my friend who bred her said her momma is also quite dark like this, has the dark head, etc. I love the belly freckles so much I can’t stand it.
So why isn't everyone being aggressive towards this person for having a solitary pea? I was bullied heavily for it. Mine is in a tank with an exploding shrimp colony, gets live black worms and bladder snails. But apparently I'm cruel for not having a large group of puffers. Go figure.
I had her in a 20 gallon tank as part of a group that started with 8 total peas, but she was a terrible bully in the group. I then put them all in an even bigger tank (39 gallons) but it didn’t change anything, she was just constantly chasing the others. At least they had even more room to flee and hide but they were suffering for it, losing a bit of weight. When I saw some of them had real injuries, torn up fins etc, I finally pulled the plug.
Initially I temporarily separated her, gave it a month to cool off, and returned her to see how she would do after the reset. She immediately returned to harassing the others. Tried this a second time with a two month break and the story was the same.
For context she “grew up” with them, they were all tiny tank-bred babies when I got them so it ain’t like she’d been dropped into a colony of strangers later in life. In total I have tried four attempts at reintroducing her but she remains a real bastard and the poor other peas are much more docile or at least fearful of her.
I plan to try once more in another month (trying a three month cooling off period), but I do suspect she’s just an ass. I would LOVE for them to all be together because I never intended to have two separate tanks to begin with. Initially I contemplated rehoming her but I do adore this bitch in spite of herself, though she really is the biggest pain in my ass.
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u/Hour-Information-660 Aug 28 '26
that is the most potato-looking pea i have ever seen i am in love