PurePerfection said:
Yes they would be with the puffers.
I had such good luck with my one little D-Puffer even in a semi community tank, but others comments on various forums and sites I read seemed to be saying that these little guys will just non-stop attack everything that moves. My theory about why it worked for me and not them (given the similarities and differences in what they did and I did), was that the DP was alone (cause they are hard to sex, and if you get even one female in your pair as soon as they are sexually mature the antics start... and if there is another male around at the time... watchout!) and I added live snails for him to hunt regularly, but I could of course be very wrong in this reasoning... and as usual YMMV.
From what I read on the sites I visited (I will look them up and edit in some of the most relevenat links shortly) ottos should be your *best* bet for tank mates when keeping DP'ers. As far as how much algae you have, that is really not a big issue if you plan to supplement thier diet with veggies and algea waffers (as the people in the catfish forum will tell you, you must do or it is fish abuse.... but who wouldn't anyway when it is soooo cute to see them going nuts over these things). Your biggest problem may be getting the ottos to live past acclimation (if you haven't kept them before... some people have no problem, but many people go through several fish before getting one successfully acclimated). As you probably know from keeping them though, D-Puffers are pretty hardy, so it would be easy to match the tank parameters to what the ottos are in at your LFS and then slowly bring it back to good common levels and/or easily maintainable levels given your tap if nessecary.
So the bottom line, I guess, is that if you've had luck with two DP in a 5, then 3 in a ten with a couple of ottos is a very conservative number and combination of fish just in terms of space and bio mass. But do check out the links for how they get when mating starts... it sounds like a miserable senario from some people's accounts.
This site says 3G/fish (so you'd be fine there) but also says make sure you have 1m and 2f's.
http://www.dwarfpuffers.com/
Here is the site about kepping them with otto's , but I also remember there being a bunch of horror stories in the comments, and now there are only three sunny remarks about how great puffers are.... uhmm I could just be remembering the wrong site, I'll keep looking.
http://badmanstropicalfish.com/profiles/profile93.html
Anyway good luck, they are such cool fish!
