how did they survive?!?!

So ever since ive taken on my 55 gallon tank ive had my brother taking care of this little nano tank that has stuff from the long island sound. however my brother is an idiot does not understand how to follow directions and spiked the salinity way way up, apparently he was topping off the tank with more sound water instead of distilled water and yesterday i was curious as to what the params were in that tank and when i checked the salinity with my new refractometer it was reading between 1.055 and 1.060 and i thought to my self how has all the snails and this horse shoe crab survived in such poor conditions??? ever since last night ive been slowly lowering the salinity by adding a couple of cups of distilled water every few hours and as of right now it is down to 1.045 and i will continue working on it through today and the next few days. I thought inverts were super sensitive to salinity how did they make it?

 

I would have thought they would be dead by now. Maybe it was a slow acclimation to the higher salinity.

 

when he gets home from school im gonna kick my brothers @$$ for being so dumb -_-

 

does anyone else have any input on what could have allowed them to make it to this point?

 

LOL! My very first tank some 28 years ago was for a paper I wrote on hermit crab behaviors. I lived in Stamford, CT at the time and everything came from the sound. I enjoyed the tank so much I kept it running after the project was done. I had no heater, no filtration, no real flow. I never topped off the tank with fresh water, just did water changes with water from the sound about once a week. I have no idea how things survived in that tank either looking back. I guess if you can survive in Long Island Sound you can survive just about anything, LOL!

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lmao i guess thats true

 

Most Inverts live in tidal areas and can handle wild swings of temperature and salinity. I am somewhat surprised of the extremes you have going on in your tank but if it happened gradually it is not a total shock.

 

i understand swings but come on lol

 

update: salinity is down to 1.035, hoping to lower it down to 1.028-1.030 by tonight a little at a time....its been about 3 days since i started lowering from ~1.055-1.060 crazy right? ive already seen an improvement in the activity of the horshoe crab and snails...im considering moving him over to my 55 reef tank so he'll have a little more roaming room until i get my eventual upgrade...hes grown from about the size of a quarter from early this past summer to currently about the size of a half dollar, itll make it one less tank to worry about considering i let my brother take care of the other one and look what happened lol

 

well update i was able to bring down the salinity to the correct levels and actually decided to throw him in my 55 reef and hes loving it...i usually see him for a little while every day and i love watching him go down and coming back up with a bristle worm in his mouth....very characteristic hes only about the size of a half dollar and has only grown to that from the size of a quarter since about april-may he'll do fine for now in this setup i should hopefully have a larger one by time he outgrows this tank if not im sure the touch pool section of our local aquarium would gladly take him in if not probably mystic seaport