Hi AC106,
It's neat to see someone else try this out. I kept a C. subducens for quite a while in high-end brackish conditions and it brought about a lot of joy to me. It being one of my very favorite of aquarium animals, I found it a difficult experiment to pass up considering some evidence I found stating it might be an appropriate situation. Off hand I can't recall how long I had mine, maybe 6 months, but it eventually went on a 5 week hunger strike before starving. I have two theories about this:
The first, and one I'm leaning to, is a stress related death enduced by my GSP. Occasionally I'd find a nip on one of his fins, or side of his body, even though I never saw any territorial issues. In fact they never interacted with each other other than feeding time, which is a huge hassle when feeding multiple predatory fish.
The second theory is salinity. The question on hand is, "how much time do they really spend in brackish-water, and how low is too low?". I got down as far as 1.015SG for a month before calling it quites and raising the specific gravity back to 1.017SG which is just about what most aquarists used to consider "full marine" back in the day. My C. subducens started to show very light, almost white, coloration after an extended period of exposure to the lower salinity water.
The tankmates you selected would be great to keep with a C. subducens, however, I'd skip out on the GSPs simply due to thier anti-social behaviour. The scats and monos are highly adaptable and prefer a high salinity range, even marine, so they'd be the perfect tankmate in case you suddenly decided to raise the specific gravity to better suit your wolf eel. The Scats/Monos will also grow quickly and be too large for your wolf eel to consume. Make sure that you select your wolf eel very carefully to ensure that it can't eat any of the tankmates.
If you search for C. subducens, or Green Wolf Eel, in this forum you should find at least 2-3 threads that I wrote which you'll probably find to be informative. You can also PM me any time if you have any questions. I haven't heard of anyone other than myself trying this species in brackish, I'm sure their out there, just not on the internet. =)
- Dave Legacy
