saltwater guppies

[ou12004]

After reading the first page the term hypocritical comes jumping at me.

How can someone whom keeps a wild animal in a small confined space draw the line of ethics with fresh to salt fish conversion. Keeping in mind, the salt conversion has no real proven effects. Home aquariums absolutely have proven negative effects in both life span and growth limitations.

For the record, I keep fish, reefs and the like. I just do so under no illusions, accepting it for what it is.

I agree completely, we are taking animals from the ocean and keeping them in small confined boxes. Yet keeping a freshwater fish in saltwater is the line people will not cross?

 

[Tahoe61]

It's a basic understand of osmosis and osmolality, isotonic, hypertonic solutions blah blah blah. Keeping fish in aquariums and then comparing their basic physiology adapted to FW is comparing oranges and apples. You can live for awhile in lower oxygen environments, or different pressures, but you should probably not.

 

[ja4207]

It's a basic understand of osmosis and osmolality, isotonic, hypertonic solutions blah blah blah. Keeping fish in aquariums and then comparing their basic physiology adapted to FW is comparing oranges and apples. You can live for awhile in lower oxygen environments, or different pressures, but you should probably not.

Point is again you last line is backed and based upon fact (apples)

The oranges of it is conjecture. Unless we have the animal psychic amongst us?

 

[mr.reeferman]

thank you !!!!!! i have seen many stores sell salty gupps

For whatever it's worth to this conversation, my first saltwater tank back in 1989, the local store sold me mollies and guppies to seed the tank. They were a lot less expensive than damsels back then. The mollies lived for many years and had multiple births. The guppies ended up in the carpet nem. So it's nothing new to have them salted. I personally don't see anything wrong with it.

 

[mr.reeferman]

the guppies i put in sw were bred for it i didnt just throw freshwater fish into salt tanks

Point is again you last line is backed and based upon fact (apples)

The oranges of it is conjecture. Unless we have the animal psychic amongst us?

 

[mr.reeferman]

well my sitter says my guppies gave birth last night both females at the same time this is a first they are usually two weeks apart but the yeild is three times as much as they are in freshwater i know they increase each time they give birth but an increase in this magnitude is unheard of in my 6 years of experience with guppies also in freshwater i could only have female fry but i have more male than female now since breeding them to full salt i will probably stop feeding these guppies and start a guppy only salt tank seeing i am having success and have learned they are not vey nutritious also i would like suggestions in what to feed as live food to give my fish the ability to hunt ..... more updates to come i am eager to see if there are less deformities or more in this batch each yield has produced around 5-7 deformed guppies each time but they are yet to small to tell at the moment ....

 

[Horn]

Why is feeding saltwater guppies bad? I will be curious to read any studies which were done one feeding guppies to saltwater fish.

Goldfish are a cold water fish and high thiamine. Guppies have very little muscle and their body composition is similar to saltwater fish in terms of protein, lipids, saturated fat, la, ala, dha. Saltwater guppies are higher in protein and lower in lipids then their freshwater counter parts.

 

[Shep]

... Saltwater guppies are higher in protein and lower in lipids then their freshwater counter parts.

A) Why would this be true? and B) unless you have done an analysis on the two and have hard data to show, there is no way to actually prove this.

 

[mr.reeferman]

We'll idk if it's true but it's possible seeing that the pressure in saltwater is greater than fresh causing to burn calories and generate more muscle also making them eat more but that's just a guess no science behind it I'm probably wrong

 

[watchguy123]

Whether we wish to recognize them or not, there are moral and ethical issues in keeping animals in an artificial environment. That is true for land (zoo) and water (aquariums). How we decide to create this environment is very individual. And how we decide to defend it to ourselves is somewhat personal. Where lines are drawn, I don't know. I'm not much of an ethicist.

When we keep meat eating critters of any sort, we kill other meat critters for them. In the wild, they do it on their own. Eat or be eaten. What is cruel and what lines get crossed, well that certainly invites a great deal of discussion as well emotion.

 

[Paul B]

When I feed guppies to salt water fish, I first inject them with cod liver oil. I feed frogfish like that.

 

[Shep]

Whether we wish to recognize them or not, there are moral and ethical issues in keeping animals in an artificial environment. That is true for land (zoo) and water (aquariums). How we decide to create this environment is very individual. And how we decide to defend it to ourselves is somewhat personal. Where lines are drawn, I don't know. I'm not much of an ethicist.

When we keep meat eating critters of any sort, we kill other meat critters for them. In the wild, they do it on their own. Eat or be eaten. What is cruel and what lines get crossed, well that certainly invites a great deal of discussion as well emotion.

Haha well this just got very philosophical

 

[Paul B]

These discussions about using live animals to feed other animals are ridiculous. We feed our fish Mysis and worms. Do the Mysis and worms have any rights? Do they have less rights then the fish we are trying to feed just because they come to us frozen and are not as expensive or interesting? When we eat a hamburger, did that cow have more rights than our dog? Why is that? I feed my fish clams every day. A few weeks ago that clam was living happily on the bottom of some bay, perhaps listening to a Lady GaGa tune. Then someone ripped it out of the mud, turned off his music and sold it so that I can stick a knife into it and freeze it to feed to my more interesting animals.
People don't want to cycle their tank with a live fish, but a dead fish or dead shrimp is fine. Do you see any irony in that? I eat fish almost every day, and for every flounder I eat, countless thousands of other "trash" fish are caught and discarded. Should I become a Vegan? If you are religious, Christ ate fish. (as did Moses, but I wasn't there contrary to popular belief) As far as I can tell, they suffocated on the deck of his boat just as they do today. We don't put them to sleep first now do we?
If you don't want to feed your fish animals from the sea, you should maybe collect stamps. But be careful, some of the glue on the backs of stamps may have been made from horse bones. OMG, a conundrum. What shall we do? I myself right now are going to start a tradition and only fed my fish Tofu.

 

[ja4207]

Go with Spam, there's no telling what's in that or how It came to be... Just bury the head and enjoy that scrumptious mystery meat!

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

After reading the first page the term hypocritical comes jumping at me.

How can someone whom keeps a wild animal in a small confined space draw the line of ethics with fresh to salt fish conversion. Keeping in mind, the salt conversion has no real proven effects. Home aquariums absolutely have proven negative effects in both life span and growth limitations.

For the record, I keep fish, reefs and the like. I just do so under no illusions, accepting it for what it is.

Sorry, I said I'd bow out, but this personal attack warrants a response.

I'm sorry you cannot see the difference, but it is super clear in my mind, and is certainly not hypocritical.

Adapting guppies to salt water does have proven biochemical changes in their cells. Not sure why you assumed nothing was proven when I mentioned it earlier. Read it for yourself in the scientific literature before claiming otherwise.

I do not think it is at all clear that keeping appropriate marine fish in an appropriate aquarium causes "growth limitations" and need not result in a shorter lifespan. Do you even know the natural average lifespan of the fish I keep? Do you even know what fish I keep? That would seem important before calling me a hypocrite.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

For those actually interested in what their fish might prefer...

I've said at least once in this thread that just because a fish can live in saline water, that doesn't mean it likes it.

While I've not yet seen such data for guppies, here's an experiment on killifish. They are naturally found all the way from fresh to salt water, and can live in each. However, when subjected to a standard test for what salinity they prefer, the individuals in this experiment preferred 17-21 ppt, as opposed to the 35 ppt of seawater are up to a few ppt in fresh water:

http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/11/1965.full

One might reasonably suppose that other fish too have preferences, and those which are not found in seawater but are found in contiguous estuaries and fresh water, might prefer the environment they naturally live in.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Here's a graduate thesis experiment that suggests that guppies pay a metabolic price to live in seawater, and alter their behaviour for that reason:

http://gradworks.umi.com/15/04/1504237.html

from it: (I bolded the last sentence)
Abstract:

The condition dependent model of female choice contends that ornaments and elaborate displays are costly to produce and maintain. Since salinity imposes a physiological cost, fish raised at higher salinities should have fewer resources to invest in growth and reproduction. As salinity increases, fish should be smaller, have more poorly developed ornamentation, and have lower display rates. Males should adopt the alternative mating strategy of attempted copulations because of the lower amount of energy required. The objective of this experiment was to determine if metabolic costs induced by salinity would affect the reproductive biology and life history of the guppy. Results suggest there is a significant size and condition difference between males raised in the control environment and those raised in the three salinity treatments. Males raised in the control environment also displayed significantly more often and elicited more female responses than those from the three salinity treatments. Fish raised in salinity tended to adopt alternative mating tactics. This suggests that male display is an honest signal of male condition, and the cost induced by salinity directly affects condition, which affects display rate, which affects female preference.

 

[brandon429]

The reason fw fish shouldn't be fed to sw ones is fatty liver disease in the marine ones from missing a form of of cholecalciferol vit d3 that is found in marine origin feed.

its the same as a human living on cheeseburgers. most dont do it well, some genetically can, but its very well known that fatty liver disease in marines is facilitated by feeding them marine fish. someone asked about that a few posts back, i read that once about the vitamin d3 difference being a real risk.

 

[4FordFamily]

 

[Shep]

So is someone going to lock this are we all just watching the comments at this point?