Are spiny eels actual eels?

[jclyde13]

Anguilla species can and do live in FW. They do not regularly move between FW and SW: they migrate once to the Sargasso Sea as adults, spawn, and die. (They can no longer eat once they start their migration.) The spawned eels migrate back to freshwater and complete their lifecycle there. So unless you want to keep a very young glass eel, which is unlikely, I don't think they would welcome brackish water.

Edit: American and European eels migrate to Sargasso Sea. Other eels have different migration locations. Too much salt in a captivity aquarium can even trigger the spawning mode and cause them to starve.

Oh, I was under the impression that they migrated annually. nvm, then.

 

[jclyde13]

Not bull sharks, since they "can" and "do" live in full marine (but so do G. tile) but I'm not the one who made up the "freshewater" terminology. I'm just stating the "reasoning" behind why so many people call G. tile, A. grunniens et al "freshwater" anything!

Oh, okay.

 

[ReelBigFish]

They spend time in freshwater, but they are not freshwater fish. When you apply the term "freshwater" to a fish, that implies that it lives its entire life in freshwater, which is not true for true eels.

I'm not saying all true eels can live in freshwater Some American eels do get "landlocked" and spend the rest of their lives in freshwater, where they get really really big. Those are usually the females found in freshwater. Males prefer estuaries.