Brackish Water Fish

[CFC]

Nice to see you posting again Neale.

The trouble with keeping plecs and other essentially soft water species in salted water is that although they may appear to be fine the salt will be doing serous damage to their kidneys as they have not evolved to cope with any ammount of salt in their enviroment, with large fish like common plecs it may take a few years to kill the fish but it will ultimately end their lives prematurely and painfully.

 

[nmonks]

Thanks CFC!

I've been hanging out a little on the livebearers forum, but work (writing and teaching) as well as constantly hungry broods of baby halfbeaks are eating into my free time.

The "plecs in brackish water" issue goes back years. I remember having a book about aquarium fish written by none other than a former director of the London Zoo aquarium. Anyway, in it there was the recommendation that Hypostomus punctatus be kept in brackish rather than fresh water.

But, as you say, that's probably nonsense. It probably isn't just the kidneys that get damaged since fish also use their gills for osmoregulation -- and messing up a fish's gills has to be a bad idea.

Cheers,

Neale

Nice to see you posting again Neale.

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