BLACK MOLLIES live in saltwater?Seahorse food?Cycle tank?

[Be11yDancer]

I read in a Barron's Seahorse book Black mollies can live in salt water and their fry can be used as Seahorse food?

If that is true, can I use them to cycle a new tank too?

Still working on my 150 gallon tank. I wanted to try my hand at breeding Mandarin fish, but I don't have the $$ for a ton of live rock right now and $1000 lighting system I dreamt of.

So I've been sidetracked by the allure of a simple empty tank with a mated pair of Hippo Erectus.

 

[RobertoVespucci]

I've read that, too. I've never kept seahorses (on my list), but from the ones I've seen I would suspect that they could catch the young fry.

Yes, you can. I can say from experience that regardless of what the lfs says, dropping a handful of them into your tank after a 1 hr acclimation is just going to kill them dead unless they were coming from salt or super-duper heavy brackwish water. Consider setting up your equipment and filling with freshwater. Add the mollies and then raise the salinity over about a month. That's also got the advantage of giving you time to get them to breed.

Let us know how the H. erectus go.

 

[bleedingthought]

I've read that, too. I've never kept seahorses (on my list), but from the ones I've seen I would suspect that they could catch the young fry.

Yes, you can. I can say from experience that regardless of what the lfs says, dropping a handful of them into your tank after a 1 hr acclimation is just going to kill them dead unless they were coming from salt or super-duper heavy brackwish water. Consider setting up your equipment and filling with freshwater. Add the mollies and then raise the salinity over about a month. That's also got the advantage of giving you time to get them to breed.

Let us know how the H. erectus go.

When I first started my salt water tank, but after it had already cycled, I acclimated a molly from freshwater to 1.025 salinity over the course of 3 hours and it seemed to be doing fine but died overnight.

 

[JennM]

I've acclimated mollies to saltwater from fresh... slow drip for 6 hours into 1.010 water and then brought them up to 1.23 over the course of a week or so. Unless you do it carefully and slowly, they will suffer from osmotic shock.

I've also caught mollies in estuary waters.

You don't need molly fry to feed seahorses - that info is correct, but dated. There are more appropriate and simple foods available now. Piscine Energetics mysis is the best food IMO, and nowadays most of the seahorses in the trade are captive raised so they're already trained to eat frozen foods. Live ghost shrimp (freshwater) are a nice treat - they will hunt them down fairly quickly. Better still if you gut-load them with spirulina flake before you feed them to the horses.

HTH

Jenn

 

[Anonymous]

I have seen Sailfin mollies in salt water in Fla..

 

[pwj1286]

At the live fish store that I work at, we just threw them in the tank to feed lion fish. They wernt hungry anymore so we took 2 mollies out and kept them in live sand bin.

Lived for days...until the lions were hungry. No acclimation. Chunked them in. Straight from PetCo.

I am thinking about putting a school (6 females and a male) in my 120, to feed corals and fish. They breed so often, 20-60 fry per spawn.
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Bob Long Intimidator