Scat Fish

[Recky10]

Hey I was wondering about scat fish. Can they be kept in a freshwater tank, or does there have to be salt. I ask this because i saw some silver scat fish in a freshwater tank and wonderd if i could do that.

 

[nmonks]

Hey I was wondering about scat fish. Can they be kept in a freshwater tank, or does there have to be salt. I ask this because i saw some silver scat fish in a freshwater tank and wonderd if i could do that.

Scats do need to be kept in at least mildly brackish water to do well. When kept in permanently freshwater conditions, they are rather prone to disease, especially vague things like lympocystis and pop-eye that are difficult to treat. They don't live permanently in freshwater in the wild, so there's really no reason to expect them to in captivity.

Scats are lovely fish though, and well worth setting up a brackish water aquarium for. They become very tame, and have loads of personality. Silver scats (Selenotoca spp.) are beautiful fish as well, in my opinion at least as pretty as anything else in the hobby.

Cheers, Neale

 

[Marine/Freshwater?]

Scats are perpetually hungry. Here is the breackdown of the scientific name: Greek, skatos = excrement + Greek, phagein = to eat ( Ref. 45335), there you have it Scats are feces eaters. They will eat just about anything. They are pretty destructive on planted tanks, other than that they are awesome fish. Really they eat so much that they grow expedentially. My favorite Scats are Silver Scats, they do not loose their color and patterning as they mature. Green Scats can look kind of crummy when they get older. It is not that adult Green Scats are ugly, it is that any scuffs and scrapes tend to be really noticable. Really it is up to the price a fish keeper wants to pay, Green Scats are pretty cheap. I still like monos better.

 

[Recky10]

So they must have some salt?

 

[Fella]

Scats do need to be kept in at least mildly brackish water to do well. When kept in permanently freshwater conditions, they are rather prone to disease, especially vague things like lympocystis and pop-eye that are difficult to treat. They don't live permanently in freshwater in the wild, so there's really no reason to expect them to in captivity.

There is your answer, they need salt.

 

[mrbudgie]

Scats dont need salt (well not all of them any way) it depends entirely from where abouts in the river they are from, my scats fully grown now and lives in a six foot freshwater tank has done for years, its healthy, eats anything likes to chase and play. Also not both sexes migrate down river I think its only the females to lay eggs or something like that of the top of my head, I'll get googling and get ya the info


ian

 

[nmonks]

All scats are migratory. All of them. Doesn't matter where you catch them in the river. All migrate up and down the river, and furthest they are found inland is only a few tens of km. They are classic estuarine fishes.

While I accept your scat may be doing well, the simple fact of the matter is that most of the time they DO NOT do well kept in freshwater aquaria. If you keep them in brackish or marine conditions, you have a 100% chance of success, but keep them in freshwater and you most certainly do not. Specimens kept in freshwater tend to be bothered by a variety of problems including lymphocystis, pop-eye, fungus, and finrot. Not always by any means, but sufficiently often that no aquarium writer I know recommends keeping them in freshwater tanks permanently.

Their reproductive biology is obscure. Spawning takes place in the sea, and the larvae are planktonic, but once the larvae metamorphose, they swim immediately into estuaries often into the freshwater zone. Adults are more typical of estuaries and shallow marine environments such as harbours.

Cheers, Neale

Scats dont need salt (well not all of them any way) it depends entirely from where abouts in the river they are from, my scats fully grown now and lives in a six foot freshwater tank has done for years, its healthy, eats anything likes to chase and play. Also not both sexes migrate down river I think its only the females to lay eggs or something like that of the top of my head, I'll get googling and get ya the info

 

[mrbudgie]

heres a good read Here

 

[CFC]

Yeah and he sounds like a really good fish keeper

All my scats died after about four years in captivity because of a hardening of eggs inside them (egg bound) because all the scats I had turned out to be females. I still have one huge female left, going now into her sixth year. It is a pity that I was never able to come across a male scat, and sometimes I think that only females migrate to brackish water. This has its parallel in Monodactylus: I never found a male in brackish water. I opened at least twenty of them: all were females.

Scats live in salty water so they should be kept in salty water. I have kept scats for years in brackish water varying from 1.005 to 1.018 with no problems while everyone i have known who has tried to keep them in freshwater has lost them or had to rehome them to a brackish tank due to constant illness. The experience of many proffessional and hobbiest level aquarists far outweighs the information in one artical full of very poor advice

from the artical

It has been said that scats must he kept in hard, alkaline and slightly saline water: for this reason it is commonly advised to add some table salt to the water. Nothing could be more wrong, because most of the scats are not dying because of low salinity. Aquarists often find that the addition of salt does not have any beneficial effect on their fish at all.

Table salt!! I'm not suprised that adding table salt doesnt have any benefitial effect, its not sodium chloride that the fish need but marine salt which is a mixture of minerals and salts found in seawater.

To prevent phenol poisoning I use an activated charcoal filter. One pint of this charcoal in a five gallon tank occupied by two scats remains active for four to six weeks.

And why would anyone be keeping two scats in a 5 gallon tank? No one has any business keeping scats in anything less than 50 gallons no matter how small they are, and anyone who knows anything about scats will tell you that you either keep one or several scats as in pairs and even small groups they will be very aggressive to each other.

 

[nmonks]

Thanks CFC.

mrbudgie -- definitely an interesting article, and thanks for the link. Oddly enough, reproduction in both scats and monos is confusing and doesn't seem to happen when they are kept "properly" but when they are kept in the "wrong" conditions. The only stories I have read about monos breeding*, for example, is when they are in freshwater.

So what I'm saying is there's definitely scope for experiment for people wanting to breed these fish. But in terms of basic maintenance, the overwhelming weight of evidence is that these fish do best in brackish or salt water. Can they live in freshwater indefinitely? Quite possibly. Is it a good idea to keep them thus? Definitely not.

Cheers, Neale

*Or spawning, anyway. I'm not aware of the fry being raised in any useful numbers.

 

[mrbudgie]

maybe i've just been a lucky bugger with mine then lol, i'll try taking a pic of it in my tank i'm you guys will tell me about it looking healthy or not a i deffinately aint no expert on scats as just proved lol

 

[Fella]

You can't really tell the health of a fish just by looking at it, just like you can't by looking at a human.