I recently bought a small 1.5" Valentini Toby, which is a neat little fish, and placed him in my 50 gal. In the future I would like to add a couple of cleaner shrimp, but I'm thinking the toby might be a little rough on them, true or false. He constantly nips at my snails which is quite comical to watch, however they have a hard shell, cleaner shrimps on the other hand might suffer. Any suggestions, appriciated, thanks MGB
Cleaner Shrimp vs Toby
- Thread starter MGB
- Start date
I have a white spotted toby puffer with a cleaner shrimp, fire shrimp, coral banded, pistol and soron without problems. Just when you add the shrimp place them in the rocks with a net so they don't look like food floating down in the tank.
I thought the toby might get in the habit of nipping those long shrimp antenas, but your success is encouraging. I do have plenty of live rock to shelter the shrimps, I'd just hate to end up with a couple of shrimp with short little antenas, so your toby never bothered the shrimp.
Depends on the puffer....I've known a toby to pick at the fins of fish more than 10x his size. He wasn't mean, he just had a fin addiction.
He was also an expert at flipping snails over that he couldn't get through the shell and picking them off upside down. Odds are cleaner shrimp would be assassinated in short order as they look too much like ghost shrimp or a myriad of other natural food.
You could try, as quietly as possible, introducing large ghost shrimp or two and if he doesn't eat them before they die of being in salt then your odds are good. If he hits a large ghost shrimp then odds are not so good. Better to find out with a 25 cent ghost shrimp than a $20-30 cleaner shrimp.
Hope this helps...
He was also an expert at flipping snails over that he couldn't get through the shell and picking them off upside down. Odds are cleaner shrimp would be assassinated in short order as they look too much like ghost shrimp or a myriad of other natural food.
You could try, as quietly as possible, introducing large ghost shrimp or two and if he doesn't eat them before they die of being in salt then your odds are good. If he hits a large ghost shrimp then odds are not so good. Better to find out with a 25 cent ghost shrimp than a $20-30 cleaner shrimp.
Hope this helps...
Petstorejunkie
New member
ditto, they eat these type of guys in the wild, you cannot curb an animals instinctual eating habits.
cleaner shrimp are a no no
cleaner shrimp are a no no
I have one of those puffers. I also had a cleaner shrimp for about a year. Then one day the cleaner didn't have a head. I had neglected to feed the frozen meat for awhile so i thought this was the problem. A few months later i got another one. In about two weeks he was no where to be seen so i have given up. I think it depends on the personality of the puffer though.
puffers do have the most personality
