Where do you get saltwater mollys for Quarantining?
- Thread starter enderg60
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I just get freshwater ones from Petco/PetSmart or LFS and acclimate them myself. It's the best way to be 100% sure they've never been exposed to saltwater diseases before. For my zebra eel I actually used half black lyretail mollies because that's all I could find at the time. I did lose 2/4 in the acclimation process unfortunately. Not sure if true black mollies would fare better.
I did do it over the course of 2 days, but I actually think that may have been a mistake. They are a dirty fish and they ended up sitting in some ammonia. I suspect that is the main reason 2 didn't make it, so maybe a shorter acclimation would have been better. I'd be curious what other people's experiences have been as well.
This may be a dumb question, but what is molly QT? Never heard of this method.
A freshwater molly converted to saltwater has never been exposed to, and has no innate immunity to, saltwater diseases. Thus, when placed in a system with saltwater fish, the molly is almost guaranteed to get sick and show symptoms if there are any diseases present (even if the saltwater fish do not show symptoms). This is great for testing whether quarantine was successful, or for determining whether quarantine is needed at all in the case of difficult to treat fish. If the molly doesn't get sick, then you can be fairly confident no diseases are present. If it does get sick, you can identify the disease(s) that need to be treated. The molly can generally be cured be placing it back into freshwater, but that molly can never be used for this purpose again, because now it has acquired resistance to disease(s) and may not get sick the next time.
An example use case: eels cannot be treated with copper. Chloroquine phosphate is needed instead, but that can be hard to acquire. A molly can be used to test whether the eel is carrying any diseases. If not, you don't have to worry about doing any prophylactic treatments. Fortunately, eels are naturally very resistant to disease, and there's a good chance they'll be clean. The molly just makes sure of it.
The reason for using a black molly is mostly that the color makes it easy to see the parasites. Any color molly can be converted to saltwater.
How fascinating! I have never heard of that until now. Seems very useful.
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I know this is anecdotal, but I have successfully put most every "delicate" (wrasses, butterfly, etc.) fish through therapeutic copper QT. I think that "hard to QT fish" are just delicate fish that are susceptible to the risks of a quick QT setup (low oxygen and high ammonia). Those are the risks, in my experience, not the copper. And copper is really my only QT tool, because it takes care of the thing that will drive you out of the hobby in despair: a total tank wipeout from velvet. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt, as they say.
i mean...regular ass black mollies? probably any petco or petsmart or anywhere that sells freshwater fish.
Black Molly Quarantine
Preface - Freshwater (FW) black mollies have been used for years in saltwater aquariums for algae control. However, this write-up will focus on their potential for identifying marine fish diseases present in a display tank (DT) and also quarantine tank (QT). The most important detail is to...
humble.fish
At the edgewood petco they did a run of Mollyfish in the SW section for algae control - according to the workers they just tossed them in without any acclimation.
I can't say if they lost a few along the way but they definitely worked.
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