What Does Aquirium Salt Do

[grimmy]

im just curious im wanting to buy somelike this http/www.junglelabs.com/pages/details.asp?item=NJ007

 

[rdd1952]

There is no need for aquarium salt in a freshwater tank unless you are using it as part of a treatment for diseases.

 

[K.J.]

It depends on the person you ask, some would say it helps for fungus treatment and others say it's a ripoff. Personally I believe it's not worth it as a medication, it's only a light tonic (imagine treating an infected wound with something as simple as water).

 

[grimmy]

ok ill try to to use after i clean my 10 then add some if it works good but if it dosent so be it thanks for the answers

 

[rdd1952]

Unless you have sick or injured fish, there is really no reason to try it. They are called "freshwater" fish for a reason, because they don't like salt water. I have had my tanks running for 2 and a half years and have never put salt in any of them.

 

[loachman]

For the most part, it drains your wallet.

 

[Bignose]

We;ve had some pretty good in depth discussions on salt on this forum.

I hope you'll read through:

http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=168186
http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=155280
http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?showtopic=157186

and specifically I'll just take a quote from some of my older posts:

Primary freshwater fishes are those that have remained, as far as we can tell from the fossil record, in fresh waters throughout their evolutionary heritage. Fishes that fall into this category include Characins, Carps and Catfishes.

Secondary freshwater fishes are those that had marine ancestors at some point in past time, but which moved into freshwater in order to occupy various niches. Cichlids are an example of secondary freshwater fishes - their nearest relatives are the marine Damselfishes of the Family Pomacentridae, and it's highly likely that both Families shared a common (and marine) ancestor.

Consequently, the secondary freshwater fishes still have at least some degree of osmoregulatory capacity for dealing with salt in the water, while the primary freshwater fishes never evolved it in the first place. So, placing primary freshwater fishes into water containing salt is a bad idea, and even modest amounts will kill them. Secondary freshwater fishes, on the other hand, can tolerate small amounts of salt, and indeed some members of secondarily freshwater Families are brackish in nature - the Cichlid fish Etroplus suratensis springs to mind as one example. Cyprinodontiformes also fall into this category - both the egg-laying Cyprinodontidae and the live-bearing Poeciliidae are also secondarily freshwater, some of the latter Family being fully brackish in the wild (indeed, the Giant Sailfin Molly, Poecilia vivipara, is fully euryhaline, and can live in fully marine water, as specimens captured in seawater off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico testify eloqwuently).

Quite simply put, if your aquarium contains any primary freshwater fishes, do NOT add salt, as those fishes will suffer considerable stress if exposed to salt, and may even die. Even in the case of secondarily freshwater fishes, salt is only a good idea if the fishes concerned are KNOWN to inhabit brackish waters in the wild.

Most fishes fall into the category of being stenohaline, namely, they are either freshwater or fully marine. These fishes should only be exposed to the kind of water in which they occur in the wild with respect to salt content. Euryhaline fishes, that can migrate with some degree of freedom between freshwater, brackish and fully marine environments, are much fewer in number, and tend to be conspicuous in this regard when encountered in the textbooks - fishes such as Scats, Monos, Therapon jarbua, velifera Mollies and one or two of the Puffer Fishes are notable for this. Within the euryhaline division, there are those that can migrate more or less at will, and those that do so developmentally - the Puffer Fish Tetraodon nigroviridis is developmentally euryhaline, spending its juvenile stages in freshwater before migrating at a steady pace to increasingly saline waters until, as adults, they are strongly brackish or fully marine fishes. Once again, and I cannot stress this enough, it pays to do the research and find out what your fish is!

The main point is that many fish evolved in an a very low-salt environment and do not have the physical mechanisms to handle salt. Will it kill them immediately... No. But, it puts a significant amount of additional stress on the fish, with all the additional problems extra stress lead to: increased susceptibility to disease, shorter lifespan, less color, less likely to spawn, etc. If you have fish that do have the capabilities to deal with salt, it won't be as bad -- though if everything is healthy and fine now, why the need for a change? But, if you have fish that are intolerant of salt, it will lead to problems down the road.

 

[mcdanielnc89]

I keep aquarium salt in my tank.. TBH, IMO it keeps the diseases away.. I haven't had to treat a fish ever since i have started with aquarium salt...

 

[Bignose]

I keep aquarium salt in my tank.. TBH, IMO it keeps the diseases away.. I haven't had to treat a fish ever since i have started with aquarium salt...

I'm sorry, but I can't let this go uncommented. mcd, this is just anecdote, and doesn't really prove anything at all. How do you know that salt has done anything at all? How do you know that your other good fishkeeping practices, like regular water changes and quarantining were enough to keep the diseases away? Maybe your fish just didn't have diseases in the first place. You just don't know. Without a control experiment, I might as well say that I repeated the words "Oogie Boogie" everytime I did a water change and that has kept my tank disease free. I mean, I've had disease free tanks for years now, too, but I don't use salt at all.

Let me put it another way, just because there is a high correlation between two events, doesn't imply causation. Just to give you a very farcical example, ice cream sales and shark bites are very highly correlated. But, there is no causation at all between them. Without some sort of controlled experiment, or at least proposed mechanism by which the salt keeps away the diseases, just adding salt at your "magic tonic" and having had no diseases doesn't really say very much at all.

edit: mcd, please don't take this as a personal attack, because I do not mean that in any way whatsoever. I just wanted to explain how anecdote is a very weak form of evidence.

 

[grimmy]

well the thing says it give off benificail electerlytes and helps reduces stres my uncle says in his opion it help break down ammonia and keep the tank clear but he said thats his opion

 

[lilfishie]

i have never usd salt in 10 years of fish keeping and don't very often get disease in my tanks, regular maintainence and a close eye for early signs has always worked for me

 

[zoekin8yg]

well the thing says it give off benificail electerlytes and helps reduces stres my uncle says in his opion it help break down ammonia and keep the tank clear but he said thats his opion

There are already electrolytes in tap water and it doesnt help break down ammonia thats what your filter bacteria do.

 

[grimmy]

well the thing says it give off benificail electerlytes and helps reduces stres my uncle says in his opion it help break down ammonia and keep the tank clear but he said thats his opion

There are already electrolytes in tap water and it doesnt help break down ammonia thats what your filter bacteria do.

yes your right but bacteria in filters is not thr only thing that helps theres other stuff that helps to

 

[Bignose]

well the thing says it give off benificail electerlytes and helps reduces stres my uncle says in his opion it help break down ammonia and keep the tank clear but he said thats his opion

There is only one partial truth in that statement, grimmy. The addition of salt, does add electrolytes to the water, "beneficial" is an unclear adjective since in a lot of processes for the fish, any electrolyte will do, they aren't looking for a specific one. That is, sodium is a good as calcium is as good as magnesium in a lot of process the fish undergoes. But, regular tap water has an awful lot of these electrolytes already, unless you are using pure distilled or RO water there isn't any need to add more.

The reducing stress statement is utter nonsense. This comes from a misunderstanding of osmotic stress. What is true is that there is a pressure difference between the fish's internal fluids and the water, caused by the difference in the concentrations of minerals dissolved in the fish's bodily fluids. This is called osmotic stress. However, stress in this word is used in the engineering/physics sense, not the same kind of stress as being predated upon on, or stress from living in poor water conditions. It is not the same "stress" at all. It doesn't lead to weakened immune system, for example. In addition, fish have evolved to deal with this stress over millions of years. That is their natural state. Just like we've evolved to deal with the stress of the atmosphere pushing down on us. And the atmosphere does push on us -- quite a lot, actually, 14.7 pounds of force per square inch. Go find a 1 inch cube that weighs 14.7 pounds and put it on your leg or arm or hand -- it's pretty heavy. But no one thinks that we need to be relieved of this stress, do they? In fact, relieving us of this stress makes us sick -- many people get altitude sickness when they first go to Denver, for example. We don't need to be relieved of this stress anymore than the fish do -- the atmospheric stress is our natural habitat, and the osmotic stress is the fish's natural habitat.

Salt helping break down ammonia is wrong, also. How does salt, which is NaCl, some Ca, Mg, etc. help NH3 goto NO2? There is only Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Hydrogen in the conversion of ammonia, no inorganic salts needed at all. Your uncle is probably confused, because salt can reduce the toxicity of nitrite. Not help convert the nitrite, just make it so that it isn't quite as deadly to the fish. Obviously, in this case, salt is only a temporary band-aid, because if you have a nitrite problem, something has disturbed your cycle. But, if you have nitrites and you can't do a waterchange immediately to reduce the concentration of nitrite, salt may be used as an emergency measure.

Finally, grimmy, you have to consider the source. Of course the box of the product the company wants you to buy is going to tell you how great it is. How bad of a marketing department would it be if the company put "not really needed very often at all, and in fact may kill some of your fish" on the side of the box? There are lots of products that make some outstanding claims, it's up to you to research them for yourself before you just use them. This goes for pretty much everything in life, not just fish keeping, but herbal supplements/medicines, cleaners, cars, etc. etc. All of them are going to trumpet how great they are on their packaging because the company is very interested in you purchasing it -- disclosing the full truth comes in a very distant second.

Finally finally, I again encourage you to read through those other threads I linked to above. I actually explained a lot of what I wrote in this reply in those other threads, and there is a lot of other really good information on this other threads.

well the thing says it give off benificail electerlytes and helps reduces stres my uncle says in his opion it help break down ammonia and keep the tank clear but he said thats his opion

There are already electrolytes in tap water and it doesnt help break down ammonia thats what your filter bacteria do.

yes your right but bacteria in filters is not thr only thing that helps theres other stuff that helps to

grimmy, if you know of this other stuff, perhaps you'd like to tell us? And show us the proof? Because there are only a few things that take care of ammonia in fishtanks, bacteria being the primary one. Live plants can take up ammonia as a food source. Other than that, you need to use a zeolite to adsorb the ammonia or do water changes. There isn't anything else.

 

[bolty]

What Does Aquirium Salt Do?

for me, it recharges my resin pouckes in my filters.