Anyone Keep Native Saltwater?

[divemaster99]

Wondering if anyone is keeping or has kept us native saltwater fish. If I ever did a saint water tank and had the opportunity to do one in a larger gallon range I'd do native FOWLR in a heartbeat over a tropical Reef setup. I know them need big tanks but like I said if I did this kind of tank I'd go big and do fish such as Snappers, Drums, Sea Bass, etc.

But regardless if what kind or size if the fish does anyone have any experience with native saltwater? If so please share it/them.

 

[muttley000]

There are threads occasionally on the big reef site of people doing this with stuff they collect locally, problem is how cold they need to be kept. Massive chillers and insulation to get the tanks into the 50's for the winter without it sweating all over the place.

 

[Itsadeepbluesea]

If you look on the native forum of this site, there is a post above Marine natives

 

[MoNsTeR FiS]

I've kept a checkerd pufferfish I caught on a fishing pole and a toadfish I caught with a net. They lived for about a year. They were cooler than they would of been if I had bought them because I caught them myself.

 

[Oddball]

I've kept northern puffers (Sphoerides maculatus), sea robins (Prionotus carolinus), horseshoe crabs, spider crabs, mossbunkers, pygmy sea horses, flounders, eastern toad fish, and blue crabs. We used to live in Montauk, out at the eastern tip of LI, NY. So, getting local native marine species was just a few minutes walk from the house.

 

[Wailua Boy]

As I kid growing up on Kauai, we had no pet store for many years(I mean we had a pet store but it closed for 4-5 years, the days before the internet). For freshwater we had available introduced livebearers(swords, guppies and Gambusia), dojo loachs, goldfish(could be found in the Wailua river), tilapia, peacock bass, LNB/SMB Chinese catfish and occasionally you could find a channel cat in the streams/reservoirs that we would collect. For saltwater, the possibilities were greater, too many species to mention. I put together a Hawaiian tidal pool biotope that was pretty cool. So native saltwater but not native to N. America

 

[Oddball]

In San Diego, I kept a trio of leopard sharks, a group of brown smoothhound sharks, a pair of horned sharks, guitar fish, the occasional bat ray, and a bunch of different live feed fish in a SW pond in my yard. I lived on the beach (Imperial Beach) and getting specimens or doing water changes was fairly easy.

 

[Chub_by]

Obviously not a big problem in SoCal, but would you say that saltwater ponds generally need covers as not to allow too much rain in, oddball?

 

[Oddball]

I caught all the fish in intertidal zones so they were pretty much used to sudden changes in salinity due to rain. And, it didn't rain all that much in San Diego.
In other areas, I would think some sort of allowance has to be made to account for rain fall.

 

[fatboy8]

I know a guy in south Jersey that has kept silversides, killies, spot, croaker, blowfish, flounder, american eel, juvi striper, perch and a few others I forget that he cast nets in his lagoon.