Salt and Plants?

[sherrymitchell]

I have new Sailfin Mollies breeding here and they like a little salt in the tank. I was going to move them into a planted 20 long with vals, some hornwort, and a few crypts..... I'm salting at 2 teaspoons per five gallons..... so that may come out to like .02% -- definately less than .03%.

Will the salt harm the plants? I'm not too worried about them if they melt down, BUT what plants would take that amount of salt????

[Aaron]

In a word, yes, the salt will hurt the plants. The mollies don't really need to salt to do well in my experience.

[RTRJR]

The sailfins would prefer hardish alkaline water (increased GH and KH) much more that salted water. Salt, sodium chloride, does boost the osmolarity a bit, but has no effect on the pH/KH or the GH. The common advic to use salt with closr to the wild molies is a myth. yes, certainly they can be brackish, but hard, alkanine includes light brackish, and salted soft acid FW is not to their liking IME.

If they fish are really sailfins, they would do better in a much larger tank. A 20 is pretty small for such fish - especially Poecilia velifera, but also Poecilia latipinna. They are 6" fish (and I have had and seen many larger).

Val, some crypts, and a number of other common and easy plants will do fine in their preferred water conditions. It would be best to have the plants established before the fish go in. They do "groom" the plants and might nibble at them a bit, which can dislodge freshly planted specimens. They should be fine together once the plants are established.

HTH

[Sonny Disposition]

Hi Sherry. You can definitely cut back on the salt. Hard to say whether you can cut it out completely or not. That depends on whether the sailfins come from an inland or coastal population, and how genetically pure their lineage is. A lot of fish that pass for sailfin mollies are really hybrids with other species, among them, fish from the sphenops complex, which probably don't need salt, but probably do need lots of calcium in the water.

The only person I know of to actually investigate the question of salt and sailfin mollie health is Dr. Joel Trexler, an ecologist at Florida International University. Basically, he concluded that sailfins (P. latipinna) do well with about a half teaspoon of instant ocean per gallon. When I interviewed him, he also said that certain marine species with a tolerance for fresh water could substitute calcium salts (probably ca+ cl- or ca+ co3-) for sodium.

Here's a link to Dr. Trexler's homepage. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see his sailfin mollie studies. http://www.fiu.edu/~trexlerj/publications.htm

When I kept them, I would add about a half teaspoon of horticultural limestone (I would guess the garden girl has some of that around the house somewhere) to a gallon of warm water and add it to the tank after water changes. It won't all dissolve. Just pour off the limestone that gets suspended in the water, leaving the dregs at the bottom of the gallon container.

No one has ever studied the sodium requirement of P. velifera, as far as I know, but it's assumed to be similar to that of P. latipinna. When I kept storebought P. velifera, I had the best luck with one teaspoon of instant ocean per gallon of tank water. My tap water, however, is probably fairly low in carbonate hardness.

Regarding plants--I kept my sailfins with Valisneria and Crypt wendtii, which didn't seem to mind a teaspoon of salt per gallon. Again, though, if you can use garden limestone and/or driveway ice melt calcium chloride, you may be able to get that down to a half teaspoon of salt per gallon. Another trick is to add a bag of crushed coral to a nylon filter bag.

Keep an eye on the males. They can be scrappy. Look out for sneaker males, too. Males mature along a continuum, and tiny sneaker males only beget more tiny sneaker males.

Good luck with them.
Bob

[PaulS]

Here's link to an article about " The Great Molly - Salt Debate".
http://www.afae.it/pages/tematica/artic ... debate.htm

[sherrymitchell]

These are golden sailfin mollies. Big orange and gold mollies. I got them from Centreville Aquarium -- a male and two females.

My hardness is high. It takes eight drops to turn the solution blue so I think that's like 150.... The pH is also high (7.. I was told that sailfins like that kind of water. Like I said, I salted a little -- a teaspoon per five gallons and they seem happy with that...... and had fry within the first month. Fry are doing well, but I need to move them to a grow out tank.

These are destined for a larger tank in time.

[Cristy Keister]

I once tested a few plants in 1.010. Val and baby tears both grew. Anubias didn't grow and didn't die. Vals especially love hard water and don't need CO2.