Catch of the day : Puffers

After a huge family diner tonight we went fishing off my aunts dock. she has a house on a river thats about a mile or 2 from the atlantic, so I usually catch all kinds of different species out there, but never any of these. I was shocked when i pulled up the first puffer. He was really cool looking with HUGE eyes and some gnarly spines and yellow stripes all over his body.



The seccond one really freaked me out as it was a totally different puffer. It had a nice marble pattern all over it, and had a more elongated body



I released both of them, as i fugured they would wreak havok on my frags, lionfish, and inverts. but on the way home I thought about maybe setting up a seccond tank for native predators. anyone have an ID on either of these guys?

~Will.

 

those are pretty cool..but you know that when you get a tank set up for one you won't be able to catch them right? that's how it always goes...

 

is the first one a porcupine puffer? though I am surprised that it went up the river as it is sw

Porcupine Puffer Fish - Diodon holacanthus

cool catch!

 

its spines were always up and sharp as hell (poking me through a fish glove), unlike the porcupines spines that lay against its body. it might be a "burrfish", but i'm still not sure.

as for the river, i got a few hermits for my 125 from a sandbar when we were out on the jet skis. the salinity of the water i took home with the crabs was surprisingly at 1.025. after big storms I catch all kinds of weird fish out there, i think they come in for refuge, or get pushed in from huge currents.

~Will.

 

tons of those guys, fish with a shore or fiddler crab, or some shrimp on the mud flats and you can catch them all day. if you go wading it becomes ridiculously easy, puffers realy on toxins, blowing up and blending in rather than swimming away from a threat. You can get them with your bare hand, very simple, just no sudden movements to alert them that their cover is blown. Lizardfish are the same way, they will think they are hiding still until they start getting picked up from their spot.

 

I go fishing in the banana river lagoon in cocoa beach fl sometimes and I catch puffers all the time. They seem to really like the taste of shrimp, which also happens to be the favored food of red fish (what we are after).

Thanks for sharing the pictures!

 

Nice catches. The coolest stuff I can catch around here is probably catfish lol.

 

Its a Striped Burrfish or the other name is Spiney box puffer. Generally considered a more difficult to look after puffer. Altho generally the same.

 

Those are really cool catches, I wish we had fish like that up here.