Is It Possible To Condition Endlers To Full-strength Seawater?

FishForums.net Pet of the Month
🐶 POTM Poll is Open! 🦎 Click here to Vote! 🐰

eschaton

Fishaholic
Joined
Sep 17, 2006
Messages
671
Reaction score
0
Location
Pittsburgh, PA
Sorry if this is the wrong forum, but since you folks are used to salt conditioning, I figured this would be the best place to ask, since the regular livebearer folks probably won't have a clue.

I know guppies can be conditioned to 1.05 fairly easy, and with time, can go to full-strength seawater. Endlers are found in brackish environs in the wild, and being from the same genus, I presume the same is true for them.

I don't do saltwater aquaria right now, but it struck me that Endlers might actually be, if they can be conditioned to full-strength seawater, a perfectly suitable fish (possibly the only suitable fish) for the "pico reef."
 
quite possibly, try it! you definately can with guppies and endlers are near as damn it the same fish.

our lfs has a marine opaline gourami once..... some idiot had decided to convert they're tank to marine gradually and just let the fish die off as they couldn't cope with the salt (awful i know but that's not the point in telling this story so i won't labour it) and this opaline gourami had just refused to die. so they had a marine gourami for bloody ages!!
 
Yowsers -- a gourami in marine conditions!

But yes, Endlers and regular guppies can both be acclimated to saltwater. But it takes time and has to be done very carefully. You can't drop them in seawater as you can mollies. Best to slowly adjust them over a couple of weeks, if possible.

Cheers, Neale
 
Yowsers -- a gourami in marine conditions!

yup, it's true in true life ;)

Ian quite wanted to do a marine community tank at one point, take loads of FW fish and acclimitise them over so you have your 'standard' community tank but with corals :D would have looked very very odd but probably quite cool. think the novelty would have worn off pretty quickly though! :rolleyes:
 
Ian is perhaps a little nuts... but you probably know that already. :crazy:

Seriously, for the innocent souls out there reading this, most freshwater fish won't survive in seawater. It is true some will (the list of cichlids is surprisingly long) but most get stressed beyond surviving more than a few hours once the salinity gets past 25% seawater. Quite a lot of pointless experiments are done on this sort of thing.

It's the same in the other direction, incidentally, with a small number of marine fishes (e.g. Arothron spp.) being able to live in freshwater, at least for a while, but most will not.

With all those nice fake corals and rubber anemones, you can probably set up a rather bizarre reef tank with neon, platies, and various shrimps and snails. Probably look hideous, but there are people that like this sort of thing.

Cheers, Neale

Ian quite wanted to do a marine community tank at one point, take loads of FW fish and acclimitise them over so you have your 'standard' community tank but with corals :D would have looked very very odd but probably quite cool. think the novelty would have worn off pretty quickly though! :rolleyes:
 
ha ha yes i'm well aware of that as is he.

it was only a sort of jokey idea we knocked around for a while, we'd never have done it.

but if we won the lottery and had all the time and money in the world we'd maybe do some serious research and see if it could be done safely, just for the hell of it! ;)
 
A friend of mine tried acclimating endlers (some very beautiful ones at that) to marine. They looked fine after the 8 hour acclimation but a few days later they all started floating and died. Could be a fluke but something to consider.
 
As I said, it takes weeks to do properly. Guppies can and do survive in seawater, but they need to adjust to it slowly. They aren't as adaptable as mollies over the short-term. But they can actually live in hypersaline water, if adapter carefully, apparently to 150% normal salinity*.

Cheers, Neale

*Chervinski, J. (1984) Salinity tolerance of the guppy, Poecilia reticulata Peters. Journal of Fish Biology 24: 449-452.

A friend of mine tried acclimating endlers (some very beautiful ones at that) to marine. They looked fine after the 8 hour acclimation but a few days later they all started floating and died. Could be a fluke but something to consider.
 

Most reactions

trending

Staff online

Back
Top