Platies

Hi
, I've read conflicting opinions  :vcross:on whether Platies do well with or without salt.
I'm in a hard water area  and thinking of adding platies to my tank which has amongst things  6 shrimps. I understand shrimps  will not tolerate salt?   Has anyone experience of keeping Platies with or without salt???
Many thanks
PS I wouldn't be thinking of trying to breed from them and would aim to have females only.

Platies don't need salt but they can tolerate it.

There is a lot of misinformation out there about livebearers. So many people say that all livebearers and especially mollies need salt. They don't. They need hard water.


I think the confusion stems from the word salt. In chemistry, a salt is the product of the reaction between an acid and a base. Common salt, sodium chloride, is the product of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide. Calcium carbonate (which I have mentioned many times in relation to water hardness) is the product of carbonic acid and calcium hydroxide. Nitrates are salts of nitric acid, nitrites are salts of nitrous acid. Sulphates are salts of sulphuric acid. On the base side there is sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium etc.
As you can see, in chemistry there are many salts and a lot of these occur naturally in fresh water. One that doesn't is sodium chloride, aka common salt, the stuff you put on your chips.

So if I were to say that livebearers need salts in the water, almost everyone would interpret that as needing common salt when what I actually mean is water with lots of salts in the chemical sense, that is - hard water.




Just for completion, several molly species are from brackish water areas. But the mollies in shops bear little resemblance to wild mollies. Shop mollies are usually hybrids of more than one wild species, and they have been bred in farms for so long that they no longer need any common salt at all. But mollies tend to suffer more than any other livebearers if they are kept in water that is not hard enough.

The main point is that platies (and mollies, guppies etc) don't need salt but they do need hard water. And they can tolerate salt better than soft water fish if it's ever needed for medicinal reasons (eg combatting whitespot)


Don't forget that any female platy that has been in a tank with a male for longer than 10 seconds will be carrying sperm and can have babies once a month for about 6 months.

Hi again, thanks Sue  for the info on pregnant females, be interesting to see if this happens when I get them. Both genders at the local MA are kept in the same tank so it's a distinct possibility !
The  water is  hard so no problem there. I'll keep well away from salt, don't want to upset my shrimps, which I've had the longest and I'm most attached to, but like your Platies littlefish

Can you pin the hardness down a bit more closely? 7 to 21 is a huge range from slightly hard through moderately hard and hard to very hard. In fact 21 is off the top of the scale with my water company!

Platies should be fine in that hardness even if it's nearer the 7 end. It's mainly mollies that have problems if the water isn't hard enough.

There are several units for hardness but fishkeeping uses just 2. They are German degrees, also called dH and mg/l CaCO₃, also called ppm.

So your water company uses the second of the two used in fishkeeping, and your hardness is 326 ppm and that converts to 18.2 German degress/dH.

Your tap water is very suitable for platies 

It should be, provided the tank is big enough - mollies are big fish (and I can't remember the size of your tank  )