You might not recognize the 3 small swimming fish in the photo, and thats to be expected. But for those who are familiar with freshwater you might notice theyre guppies! They currently live in a softie 5 gallon reef with a yellow clown, a pom pom crab, and some snails.
A couple months ago I found some papers and old forum posts about guppies surviving in saltwater and it really piqued my interest. So I decided to give it the old college try and see what I could do. I started with 5 males and 5 females in a bare tank of fresh water. Every few days I would do a 25% water change with 1.025sg sea water and acclimate them to salt. It took about 2 weeks to convert them to pure salt water.
During the acclimation process, we lost 3 females, but I suspect that is because they were petsmart female guppies with weak immune systems. They passed very quickly in the process, and everyone else that made it through the initial jump in salinity stayed fine. None of the endler/guppy hybrid males had any issue and didnt even seem to skip a beat which I attribute to better genetics and less inbreeding. My next round will be done more "scientifically" and im currently in the process of establishing a line of "mutt guppies" with stronger genetics.
Unfortunately about a week in I did lose 2 males and female to jumping in a single night when I left the lid off accidentally. That brought my number down to 4, consisting of 3 males and 1 female.
The remaining girl gave birth to a healthy 13 fry. 7 made it to the 1 month mark, but about a week ago I somehow lost 6 of them during a tank rescaping. No clue how they all died so suddenly, but I have a feeling it was the hermit crabs or my hairy green mushroom corals as I've seen it catch some of the fry before. Unfortunately, during birthing one of the fry got stuck in the females vent and she passed away. As of now only 1 baby remains, but is growing and eating fantastically.
Last night one of the males died by the new pom pom crab when he investigated it. The crab smacked him with the anemones and the fish swam off. He seemed fine for a while, but I found him stuck on the filter intake about an hour later.
As of now I have 2 males and 1 female "tequila sunrise" fry. Not a great number from the starting 10, but it seems like most of the deaths were due to accidents and only 3 were directly related to the salt acclimation. Im hoping to try again and see if I can stabilize a line in saltwater, because these have been quite an entertaining reef fish.
Im sharing all of this info, the successes and failures, because on any threads people start with this topic they never continue to update nor describe their process. Ill try and keep this updated with any changes in the breeding project.
