Monos

[afireinside]

Ok, I know Monos happen to be brackish, but I went to The Rain Forest Café today and I saw Monos, in a saltwater aquarium! This Rain Forest Café happens to be in the Mall of America, which has the worlds largest underground aquarium. So, obviously they aren't doing anything wrong. So I was wondering, are there a specie that goes in saltwater? These guys had absolutely no black line going through there eye, but were deffinately mono.

 

[Ben]

Monos and other large brakish fish sometimes require a higher SG then normal and eventually when adults, they need to be put in full saltwater aquarium.
even Sailfin Mollies can be slowly, very slowly, put into a saltwater.

Theres a pinned topic at the top of this page with a list of Brakish fish that can be put into saltwater and/or saltwater.

DD

 

[nmonks]

Hi there ---

There are three mono species traded. Two are difficult to tell apart. The Brackish FAQ has links to the Fishbase entries if you want to check them out.

http/homepage.mac.com/nmonks/aquaria/brackfaqpart3.html

Monos thrive in sea water. In the wild they swim constantly between fresh and salt water, but in captivity they will live perfectly well if kept in sea water all the time. There are good reasons to fluctuate the salinity in aquaria (shift parasites, promote spawning) but for practical reasons aquarists rarely do. For one thing, this hammers the bacteria in the filter. Certainly, monos kept in salt water are healthier than ones kept in purely freshwater.

As monos age the markings fade somewhat. I suspect the specimens you saw were simply older than the ones you've seen in books or aquaria.

Black mollies will adapt to marine conditions from fresh, and vice versa, in about two or three hours. Done this many times and never lost any. If you think about it, brackish water fish need to be able to survive the change in tides twice a day, so potentially may be exposed to changes from salt to fresh back to salt within a twelve hour period. In other words, at most, they have about six hours to make the change from one to another. The idea these fish need days or weeks is nonsense. What does need weeks of acclimitasation is the filter, because the freshwater bacteria will die and need to be replaced with brackish/salt water ones.

Cheers,

Neale