Buenos Aires Tetras in Brackish?

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spitz006

spitz006

Piranha
MFK Member
Dec 25, 2010
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Allegan, MI
My girlfriend just suprised me with 3 albino buenos aires tetras. After researching where they are collected, it seems they come from the Rio De La Plata in Argentina which seems to me to be a giant estuary. Does anyone know anything about this river and how much salt there might be in it? I'm keeping them in light brackish right now and they seem fine.
 
yeah but they are not locally collected from argentina, they have probably got 5 generations born in captivity. Yeah they can handle brackish but they have been born and raised in full fresh and they will do absolutely fine in fresh. I had some that lived for 7 years in full fresh.

Lots of cichlids can also be kept in brackish and even full marine but that doesn't mean they have to be.
 
Cichlaholics Anonymous said:
Why not put them in your freshwater tanks?
Click to expand...
4 of the 6 tanks are freswhater, the other two are light brackish.

10 gallon planted: They are too large and boisterous to go in a 10 gallon, not to mention they reportedly destroy plants
27 gallon unheated pond: Already overstocked
75 gallon peaceful community: They will nip the fins of my angelfish, platies, etc
75 gallon aggressive tank: They will probably end up getting killed by my cichlids
 
Trust me, they won't get killed by your cichlids. I had some in with my cichlids and I had some really nasty guys including a malawi trout (fast predatory cichlid)
they make great dithers for just about anything. unless you have nocturnal predators in the 75 I'm pretty sure they will be too fast for the cichlids.

And yeah as mrbigglesworth said, I wasn't suggesting that you can throw anything into certain salinities. I should have been more specific. cichlids can tolerate salinity for extended periods of time, they naturally move in and out of different salinities of water so they can adjust to it relatively well. as with any conversion you should place a bag of water of slightly higher than the correct salinity over a bucket with the fish in their own tank water. pierce a small hole in the bag and put it on a grate of some kind. let the salty water slowly drip into the bucket of tank water and fish, this way the fish will be acclimatised to the correct salinity slowly and effectively.

I did the above for 2 monodactylus kottelatai from 0.002sg to full marine
and the same for a green spotted puffer.
 
Interesting. Thanks! The 75 gallon contains 1 finleyi cichlid, 1 stormsi cichlid, 5 pseudotropheus aurura, 1 synodontis ocellifer, and 1 boesemani rainbowfish
 
just did some quick research on those species, you should be fine. Buenos Aires tetras are fast and unless you have large predatory fish in your tank you should be more than okay. 75g is also a lot of room for them to get around.

It's when you have knife fish, bichirs or any nocturnal predators that you will start to notice the smaller tetras dissapearing.
 
Rafini said:
yeah but they are not locally collected from argentina, they have probably got 5 generations born in captivity. Yeah they can handle brackish but they have been born and raised in full fresh and they will do absolutely fine in fresh. I had some that lived for 7 years in full fresh.

Lots of cichlids can also be kept in brackish and even full marine but that doesn't mean they have to be.
Click to expand...

I doubt that a few generations in captivity to reverse significantly that salt tolerance that evolved over thousands of years.

Having said that, they are only mildly salt tolerant and they are only found in the upper reaches of the La Plata Estuary where the salinity averages about 10 ppt and fluctuates between 3 ppt and 17 ppt. It seems to me that they can tolerate a brief exposure to the salinity of 17, and they recover when the salinity falls to 3.

Here is the chart of 5 different collection sites:
Sites S(ups)
1 17.1 ± 4.1 17.0 ± 5.3
2 14.8 ± 6.2 16.8 ± 5.2
3 13.3 ± 6.1 17.2 ± 5.3
4 11.3 ± 6.5 17.1 ± 5.5
5 10.0 ± 7.2 17.4 ± 5.1
They were only found in site 5. Apparently all the other sites were too saline for them.

And here is the article from which I obtained the data points:
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1679-87592015000300181
 
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