How should I acclimate in this situation? Please help.

reefiniteasy · Aug 23, 2019

Tomorrow I will be picking up two black clownfish from a fellow REEF2REEF member who is exiting the hobby. He is donating the clowns to my classroom. I do not plan on QTing the fish as they are healthy, but more importantly, I don’t have a QT setup. Can’t afford that right now. My tank salinity is 1.025. The tank the clowns are coming from is 35ppt. They will be in a bucket for a 45 minute ride from the pick up to my school. I don’t know how long they will be in the bucket from the previous owner’s home to the pickup location. How should I go about acclimating? Should I drip RODI to lower the salinity to match my aquarium? Is it enough of a difference to even matter? Should I just get them out of the bucket as fast as possible?

I will take any and all advice.

These will be my first saltwater fish. So this is new to me. Thank you for reading.

Jeff Jarry reef · Aug 23, 2019

I would put fish and water in a bag maybe ziplock and float fish and bag in the tank they will live in. About 15 minutes for temp acclamation. Then pour fish in a container add a cup of tank water let sit for 15 minutes. And repeat then put fish in tank. Or you can drip acclimate to for about 30

Jekyl · Aug 23, 2019

35ppt is the same as 1.025 so no worries. Just run a drip line from your tank to the bucket at about 1 drop per second. Let go for half an hour and should be good. Make sure not to have a ton of water in there when you start the drip.

motortrendz · Aug 23, 2019

35 ppt and 1.025 are the same. I would drip acclimate to the new tank and then net and move them into the new tank after about 45 min

reefiniteasy · Aug 25, 2019

Thank you all for the advice. Special thanks to @Jekyl for the emergency help. The water the clowns came in was 43ppt. After drip acclimating for 40 minutes. And only getting the salinity in the bucket down to 40ppt. @Jekyl suggested I get them into my tank ASAP. I then transferred them into my tank and everything was okay. They are very active and were eating almost right away. I think the bucket they were in may have had salt residue in it. I do have another theory on why the salinity was so high but it doesn’t matter.

motortrendz · Aug 25, 2019

Alex Sadowsky said:
Thank you all for the advice. Special thanks to @Jekyl for the emergency help. The water the clowns came in was 43ppt. After drip acclimating for 40 minutes. And only getting the salinity in the bucket down to 40ppt. @Jekyl suggested I get them into my tank ASAP. I then transferred them into my tank and everything was okay. They are very active and were eating almost right away. I think the bucket they were in may have had salt residue in it. I do have another theory on why the salinity was so high but it doesn’t matter.

Wow 43ppt. That's insanely high. Only thing I can thi k of is they person who.you got them from hasn't been maintaining the tank and allowed evaporation to get away from him and that made the salinitly condense to such high numbers. Hope all is well and happy reefing brother.