Catfish and Salt?

[jeniferv]

Hi,

I am VERY new to the fish world and have a question regarding catfish. Do they tolerate salt? I was recently advised to add some aquarium salt to my tank to ease the stress on my fish, but I am told that catfish do not tolerate salt of any kind. I forget the brand of this stuff .... Doc something. If I remember correctly, the dosage was 1 tablespoon for every 5 gallons. I have a 12 gallon tank.

Thanks in advance.

[MatsP]

Simple answer is "Don't add salt to the tank".

There are situations when salt is used for medical purposes (to fight of Ich for instance), but in general there's no particular reason that you should add salt to the water.

Here's thread that discusses this at some length, with the conclusion that salt should not normally be added to an aquarium.

"Aquarium salt" in general is either natural sea-salt or artificially created mixes that try to copy the contents of natural sea-salt.

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Mats

[jeniferv]

Thank you - that was a very informative thread. I hope to read the rest of it at some point today!

After I do a few more water changes, how will I know if I have managed to get all of the salt out? Is there a test I can purchase?

If it matters, I have a 12 gallon tank.

Thanks!

[MatsP]

so, I presume you have roughtly two teaspoons of salt in the tank at the moment, right? That's about 10gram of salt (roughly speaking, it may be 12g or 8g or something like that, but it doesn't really matter much).

So, let's say you do 25% water change. So you now have 75% of the salt left in the water, or 7.5g.
Next time you change 25% of the water, you get 75% of 7.5g, and so on. After 8 water changes you've got about 1g of salt left, or 10% of the original quantity, at which point it's close enough to "no salt" to no longer worry about it.

Of course, if you do 40% water changes, it will be a bit quicker, something like 6-7 changes.

If you want to do this as quickly as possible, start doing 25% changes for a couple of days in a row, then do 40% changes for three days, and you should be ok. (That would leave you with about 12% of the original salt quantity).

Doing small water changes to begin with will let your fish get used to the change in water more slowly than if start with a big change. As you get lower concentration of salt, the changes become less dramatic.

You could test the water for conductivity, and compare it to your tap-water. But just doing the calculation on how much of the salt you remove, you'll be fine.

Remember to use dechlorinator when you add the new water, so you don't put dangerous chlorine in the tank...

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Mats