More About Ginky...

I forgot to mention, the four teeth that he had were
two on top, two on the bottom. And one of his top teeth
got chipped in the infamous "Skirt Incident", and it only added to his look.
The scarred lower lip, the chipped tooth, he wasn't a fish to
mess with.

I think we had him in a 50 gallon tank, I think. It was a lot
of work to maintain the tank.
We had literally been given the ultimatum by our apartment
manager, get rid of Ginky or move. We had lived there for about
4 years. We moved.
I like how that was a non-issue for us. My then-husband S
didn't even consider it for 2 seconds, he said " Well then, we're moving."

It was the size of the tank, and the fact that we were upstairs. We managed
to keep it a secret for 3 years, but there was an unrelated issue and the tank
was discovered, we were narc'ed on by a handyman.

The reason I know that he was 14 inches long, I measured him. He let me. I
had to be careful because he wanted to eat the string I was using to measure
him with, he thought it was a worm. : )
I used a cloth string, and then compared it to our tape measure.

BTW, the photos online I've seen of Fahakas, they all look sickly. Most of them,
anyway.
I need to find some photos of Ginky and get them transferred onto the computer.
Ours was the healthiest looking one I've seen.

I wouldn't recommend getting one unless you plan on being in it for the long haul.
fahakas take a lot of work to keep healthy. You have to try to figure out how to keep
their teeth ground down, keep them fed, and they can be picky. People frequently
don't get the water right. You have to figure out what amount of brackish your specific
puffer needs.
We think ours came from a place up the river where he was far away from the
saltwater and brackish water. He thrived on fresh water, we had tried him on brackish
for a time, but he wasn't thriving. We adjusted the water to non-salt and non-brackish,
and he began thriving! Appetite increased, growth, it was clear that he didn't like brackish
water at all. The Nile is the longest river in the world, I think I read that somewhere. So who knows what part he actually came from.

One time he ate a goldfish whole, gulped it without chewing it, and he got constipated.
Yep. Thus began a lot of speculation and research online. For the question is, How exactly
do you de-constipate a fish? Are there fish laxatives? This is funny, but in truth, our
Ginky had us worried, he looked miserable, and we were afraid the constipation would kill him.
Finally we read somewhere that if we switched to brackish water temporarely, it would
do the trick.

I don't know how it worked, but it DID work.
But my main point is : Don't get a fahaka unless you plan on being serious and conscientious
about taking care of it. And you'll wind up falling in love with it. Their faces have so much expression.
You CAN see when they are happy, or miserable. They really do have the sweetest faces.
And their eyes can move around, they can actually move their eyes to look at you, or in
the case of the string, he was turning his eyes in to focus on the string. It makes them look so
human.