Acclimating Mollies To Saltwater

[fishlette]

since announcing the arrival of the marine section at my shop, ive had a lot of people asking about acclimating mollies etc after reading the internet and asking on here for my own benefit also, i decided there are sooooooo many different accounts of it taking anywhere from one hour to 3 months

so i decided to do it over the space of a day at work. i took 2 mollies from the fresh water section and first added them to water with a gravity of half that of brackish water. i was going to put them straight into brackish as i have done this at home but i decided to go a little slower. they stayed in that for half an hour and were then added to the brackish water and left for half an hour also.

this is when i set up a slow drip going into the tank with saltwater with a gravity of 1.024 and another drip coming our of the tank at the same rate as the drips coming in. the tank was heated but slowly turned down a degree to match the temp in the marine section. this drip process continued for 4 1/2 hours until the salinity measured 1.024.

throughout the whole process the mollies seemed completely unaffected. i added them into the marine section after establishing that everything was indeed the same in both the mollies water and the marine section. still completely unaware that their water parameters had just changed so drastically.

they ate the first night and have gotten better and better since. its been 13 days now and i have completed this process with 12 mollies and all of them are incredibly healthy and happy

just thought id share this with you all

 

[theotheragentm]

That is astounding. Do you have pictures of a set up to process the acclimation?

 

[fishlette]

That is astounding. Do you have pictures of a set up to process the acclimation?

i took pics all the way through to show what i did but due to the new little puppies love for chewing, my camera cable has been chewed into about 4 pieces. along with my handsfree mobile cord and my bluetooth charger grrrrrr anyhoo, im borrowing one from a friend that i hope will fit. otherwise i will have to buy a new one. whichever way, im trying to get it sorted over the next day or two.

i hope i dont offend, but i dont quite understand exactly what pics you are asking for lol i dont know if im reading it wrong or if im just not understanding it or what hehe

 

[theotheragentm]

I've seen pictures of auto-acclimation setups with drip lines. I was curious if you did something like that or did it manually. It sounds like you did it manually. I'd love to see how it all progressed, setup and all.

 

[fishlette]

nah i didnt use anything fancy i got a 40L tank with nothing but the water for them, a heater and an airstone. i placed a goldfish bowl full of salt water about 6" higher than the tank. then i put another goldfish bowl, empty this time about 6" below the tank.

i then got two pieces of airline tubing about 9" long each. i tied a rubber band around the end of both pieces of hose. i tied it just tight enough that it let out a drop every second or so. i kept all this in a quiet place where i could leave them be and not have anything that may stress them out. over the next 4 1/2 hours that it took i slowly but surely turned the temperature down to the 24.5C that the marine section is set at.

thats basically it. im working on making it easier by designing some kind of little tube system with valves that you can turn to control drip rate etc tis something similar to the idea i had about soething like that for draining and refilling multiple betta tanks at once there are 35 small betta tanks at my shop and i have to do something to make the water change process easier as im one of the few places that changes their water every 3 days and it can be very time consuming.

will work on getting this pics up asap

 

[theotheragentm]

If you cannot make it less time consuming, maybe you can get a flower nursery to open next door and sell the fish water as fertilizer.

 

[fishlette]

If you cannot make it less time consuming, maybe you can get a flower nursery to open next door and sell the fish water as fertilizer.

in an ideal world that could work