Salt and fish/shrimp

[newtoshrimps]

Just a question about adding aquarium salt to tanks.
Can all my fish deal with a little salt added to the tanks?
I have always added a little salt to my guppy tank (less than a teaspoon to 20 gallon every couple months... water changes weekly with no salt)... However, I am venturing out with other fish.
Fish are:
Aquarium 1, 20 g: oto cats, guppies, blind cave tetras, neon tetras (and want to get rid of... small brown snails).
Aquarium 2, 20 g: swordtails, guppies, oto cats, cories, neon tetras, betta
Aquarium 3, 5.5 g: cherry shrimps, oto cats

Any thoughts?

[sheamurai]

There's really no need for salt at all, it's just added expense for debatable/dubious benefit.

http://www.aquaticcommunity.com/aqua...ad.php?t=31554

[Stlouisfish]

There is really no need to add salt to any of your tanks - in general, it is only recommended to use salt to treat certain illnesses that respond to it (like ick). Best to only use it for therapeutic reasons.

[Goes to 11!]

There's really no need for salt at all, it's just added expense for debatable/dubious benefit.

+1
Totally agree

[ddavis1979]

The only time I use salt is to battle Ich.

It can be damaging to some fish and plants.

[newtoshrimps]

Because the guppies have babies montly and I can only sell them every 3 months (luckily I sell monthly), I found that a little salt helped to keep ich down. Also the salt does not affect the guppies.
I used to have a large number of guppies in the tank.

However, I don't have as crowded a tank now... so maybe I will cut salt out.

Thanks.

[Stlouisfish]

What do you mean by "keep ich down" - you mean you never had ich so you feel the salt did the trick?

Salt is not a preventative treatment if the illness isn't visible - many fish come home and are perfectly healthy - some are harboring diseases and the stress of being transferred or being put into an uncycled tank will bring on illness, but if you don't see anything & your fish are acting fine, there really isn't a point of using it routinely as stated above.

[newtoshrimps]

No... I had ich many times from having too many fish in the tank... when I used salt (which does not affect guppies, which I was raising for a local pet store) the ich went away... I finally started using some salt in the tank (as recommended by the pet store) and no ich ever came back.

Please note that this was 20 years ago before anyone else tells me salt is not good and the dangers of using it!

[mizzoutank]

The ich probably went away if you started to stock correctly.

so now you know to not overstock or issues like ich occur.

and another reason to not use salt-if you were to get a strain of some disease in the tank and you constantly dose salt, then when you medicate with salt it has a weaker effect bc of the tolerance built up by it.