An experiment with a baby pleco

[Whisperer]

If I can acclimate a pleco to saltwater, it will do a better job at cleaning the glass. Sounds radical, I know...

It is approximately 1.5 inches. Caught it in the river behind my house, and slowly acclimated it (1 hour).

 

[MattG]

Good luck with it. I have heard of others trying it with no success.

 

[sacremon]

The fact that you are catching plecos in the river behind your house is what scares me. That along with the pictures of oscars in canals in FL just make me shake my head.

 

[avp]

Hmmm....Pleco or Clingfish? More pics, please!

-avp

ps: I hear Oscars are good eats.

 

[Maxi]

Yep, that pleco could be sick and you don't know it. But if it does survive.... You will have to tell me what species it is

Has anyone tried an oto?
Or is that an oto :s

 

[rossthefishman]

Oscars are delicious to eat. I've caught them in the everglades, and They're THICK stocked in there!

 

[Maxi]

Lol
I wonder what it tastes like..

 

[AquaReeferMan]

:rollface:

 

[clockwurk]

Plecos are native to FL? Holy crap...Ive never seen them.

 

[AIMFish]

One more pleco on his way to fish heaven.

 

[zma21]

Lower your phosphates. At least that way a fish won't be harmed.

 

[schoch79]

If that works you gotta keep us updated. It is definately a neat idea but I can't see it working. It's not even a species known to live in brackish waters let alone full saltwater.

 

[szwab]

i would think that the acclimation would need to be much slower.

 

[yellowslayer13]

try 24 hoursslow drip 10 per minite

 

[nctommy]

No drip rate will ever change the fact that the fish will die. Physiologically, the fish cannot survive. These fish have adapted over millions of years to survive in either fresh water or salt. Specialized systems in the body have formed to deal with the problems that arise in each environment. For instance, osmoregulation is the process by which water moves across a membrane from areas of lower concentration to higher concentration. This is natures need to balance things. Therefore a freshwater fish, who has a higher concentration of salt internally compared to the water he lives in, will constantly absorb water from the environment he lives in. The fresh water fish has adapted its kidneys to produce a dilute urine to rid the fish of excess water. Small amounts of salts are still lost from the body through the gills so they have a salt pump that operates in the gills to pump the salt back into their body. This system is controlled by pituitary hormones. Now if you reverse the process by placing a fresh water fish in salt water, the exact systems that save them will kill them. In a salt water environment, the fish's internal body salt concentration will be lower than the surrounding water therefore the fish will lose water constantly without any controll. Also, the fish will continually urinate low salt urine losing more water, and at the same time the fishes gills are pulling in more and more salt from the water. Internal salt levels will sky rocket and the fish is a goner. The fresh water fish will dehydrate himself in the salt water just like a human would.

 

[pikachusalad]

I was going to comment on the "slow" acclimation too...but...yeah, I agree - the real point is that fish is a goner.

For some reason I want to bring up Bull Sharks in the Mississippi river as far north as Illinois being considerably larger than that little pleco and still having to return to the ocean to live...but it probably doesn't exactly fit the topic...

 

[der_wille_zur_macht]

There are certainly species that can live well in both fresh and saltwater - look at all the people who keep mollies in reef tanks, for one thing.

However, that doesn't meant that it's OK to just haphazardly try it with ANY FW fish. . .

 

[LionfishFinatic]

molly's are a brackish fish and even then they won't live their whole lives in saltwater, so their expectancy of life drops tremendously. I think it will definitely die as unlike the bull shark mentioned above, it cannot expel salts from it's gills to keep it alive (as it is vice versa for the bull) and it's kidney's will most likely give and it will die.

 

[sacremon]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10571328#post10571328 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by clockwurk
Plecos are native to FL? Holy crap...Ive never seen them.

Not native, invasive species. Introduced likely from people dumping them into the local waterways when they wanted to get rid of the tank. Oscars have established themselves in the same way, displacing native species.

 

[Jeremy Blaze]

Doesn
t really look like a pleco to me.