How fast can I acclimate a Scat to my reef??

[reptileguy112]

I often look on craigslist to look for people with fish that can't care for them anymore and are free and I found a person giving away a bunch of freshwater fish but one of the fish is a scat which is a brackish to saltwater fish and i want to have it in my SW. How fast can I acclimate it without hurting it?

 

[cu455]

I acclimated my green scat for about an hour. I driped water into a bucket and then every ~15mins I will remove a few cups from the bucket and add a few cups of my tank water. I had it for a few years and then passed it on to a fellow reefer that had an aptasia problem.

 

[reptileguy112]

That sounds quick, I thought it would take at least a week. Was the scat fully freshwater?

 

[Reefing Madness]

Scat won't take long to acclimate at all. Hour is ok. Had one, I think I did it in 20mins.

 

[Paul B]

A Scat is about the hardiest fish there is. To kill them you have to put it in the street and have a school bus run them over, twice.

 

[reptileguy112]

Ok, that sounds pretty hard to do because most of my fish can take being driven over by a bus at least three times.

 

[reptileguy112]

They replied with this, "It's been living in freshwater for 10 years so it wouldn't survive a saltwater tank". Is this true??

 

[NanaReefer]

No it's not true.

 

[eatbreakfast]

Fish that are naturally found in brackish environments are able to deal rapidly with changing salinity. As the tide comes in or goes out they are dealing with rapid swings of high to low salinity.

 

[Reefing Madness]

You will be able to accliamte the fish, don't worry bout it. They told you wrong, because they have no idea.

 

[KrisReef]

I got two yesterday and after reading this thread I was worried that these scats would feel cheated since I didn’t have a bus for acclimating them properly. I dumped them in and this morning I found them swimming and eating when I put some food in the water.

They are hard to see but seemed ok, even with out the bus?

 

[Paul B]

Those guys were the first "Salt water" fish I had in my tank. When we all had fresh water and converted to salt we just kept adding salt until it came to sea water salinity. I was already keeping brackish fish so they didn't seem to mind the change.

But you can't kill a scat. They are tougher than clownfish and it would take a good size school bus to kill them by running them over.