Extremely Aggressive Pleco Cat

[Mikey1]

i have been keeping fish for 25+ years, and have pretty much kept every type of freshwater tropical fish, never got into the saltwater, i have bred discus, angels, etc etc,

in all my years i have never heard of or seen a pleco cat act this way,

i have many tanks ranging from 20 gal to 180 gal,

the tank im having the issue with is a 100 gallon tank that has 6 tinfoil barbs, 3 bala sharks and a gold spot pleco who has turned into the bully of the tank,

all these fish have been together since they were very small, currently the tinfoils and balas are about 4-5 inches and the pleco slightly smaller,

for the most part everybody minds their own business and gets along,

when i feed the fish the pleco turns into a demon, he chases the tinfoils around the tank like crazy, sometimes after he "darts" at one of them i can see scales floating in the water that he has torn off the tinfoil,

he seems to leave the bala sharks alone,

i have never seen or heard of a pleco acting like this, the pleco is very well fed, so its not like he is starving,

i guess im not looking for a solution here other than removing the pleco, im just wondering if anybody else has experienced this kind of behaviour from a pleco cat?

i have kept many pleco cats (zebra, royal, bushy nose etc etc), but never had one aggressive like this before,

 

[MrsM]

ive not had any experience with them but just wanted to offer sympathy to the tin foil. .. maybe he needs his own tank sorry not to be a help....didnt want to read and run... hate it when my threads have a zillion view but no replies

 

[thereverendturtle]

I've seen this before. Usually a territorial male chasing away fish it thinks might disturb its nest. I realize your fish hasn't bred, so why would he act this way? Simply he's ready for love and ready to defend his home. Tinfoils will feed from the bottom more often than balas, so he sees them as a bigger threat. Moving him to a tank by himself is probably the best course of action.

 

[MBOU]

Its not an uncommon thing at all, most plecs can get really quite aggressive towards othr fish...

It would help to know what species your plec is as I know of at least two species that go by the common name of "gold spot plec".

To me that would be either L001 P. joselimaianus (aka common plec) or L007 L. galaxias (aka Vampire Plec). Either way, I have seen both latch onto the sides of fish out of several reasons, have seen in it fish that are just fed algae wafers, they need much more meaty diet. Also with space, lack of big hiding holes... too small a tank... and so on....

But realistically, big plecs with broad sided fish is rarely a good idea. We had problems with some commons and sailfin plecs eating the slime off our big mbu puffer and leaving big bite marks on it so we had to remove the plecs.

Your only solution is to seperate the fish really, I always found they never stopped doing it once ther started.