List of Acclimated Freshwater to Saltwater Fish

[sdblanshan]

I converted mollies to full sw, 1.024 and I have many fresh water mollies, the saltwater mollies are by far-orders of magnitude healthier and more graceful in movements than the freshwater mollies from the same source and family... I am making a new topic to outline my unusual acclimation method. 100 percent sucess so far, no deaths...

 

[zooman72]

The reason some fish can take different salinities has to do with evolution. Fish probably evolved in fresh water. They believe this because all fish have a flap of skin in the throat that prevents them from swallowing water. This is for preventing the fish from being flooded with water, freshwater fish osmosis says that the body is constantly being filled with water (because their bodies have more salt then the surrounding water) so the kidneys have to regulate the content of salt and produce lots of urine to eliminate it. Salt water fish have the flap of skin, but the opposite problem, their bodies are being dehydrated because the salinity is higher in the ocean then their bodies. They are constantly drinking and their kidneys remove salts, but they produce very little urine. Fish that have the ability to change the function of the kidneys can be kept in various salinities, thus can be adapted to fresh or salt or anything in between.

Actually, scientific consensus generally states that fish probably evolved from primitive "pseudo-chordates" in marine environments - the earliest fossils are found in former marine sediments.

Having a throat valve is valuable for food consumption, but has little to do with osmosis stress in fish - the gills are the major site of net water loss in saltwater species and net water gain (and sodium loss - see chloride cells for sodium uptake) in freshwater species.

Another issue to consider - why do fish (and all other vertebrates that can use kidneys to osmoregulate) have circulatory fluids with a relatively high salinity? Probably as an artifact of evolution - evolving in a marine environment from invertebrates that were "osmoconformers" (i.e. could not regulate ionic composition significantly from surrounding environment).

:fish1:

 

[sdblanshan]

Nice info

 

[Bpb]

My Dalmatian mollies all became anemone food. Watched it happen. Not sick or dying. Just stupid

 

[reeferstace]

My Dalmatian mollies all became anemone food. Watched it happen. Not sick or dying. Just stupid

Not stupid, just out of their normal environment where anemones would not be found.

 

[gam3ovr]

Not stupid, just out of their normal environment where anemones would not be found.

Exactly

 

[homegrowncichli]

I've read that among the crossbred mollies, the orange or red pigments, are bred from freshwater species well inland whereas the black and the white ones are from the brackish/marine species.

I've kept mollies in an attempt to provide a source of food for my bangaiii cardinals in the past. I've calculated I needed 6 or 7 females and a single male in the tank with my cardinal pair, however, I did not anticipate the amount of food mollies eat compared to other fish, like damsels. They eat like goldfish and if I cut down their feeding to what I feed a damsel, they get so thin within a few days that they die off. I would say a mollie ate about 3 or 4 times the food of a damsel of similar size. That was a large bioload.