Fish Eating Away My Plants

[Rafael Dilone]

Ok so i have a 10 gallon planted tank with 3 otocinclus catfish and 1 mystery snail who i assume are the ones eating away at the plants. Their tank mates are a small school of cardinal tetras. I feed them bloodworms, daphnia, brine shrimp, sinking shrimp pellets, flakes, micro pellets and micro wafers. But it seems that the sinking shrimp pellets the other fish are getting to it before the algae eaters have a chance to eat. So i assume the algae eaters are eating my plants since they are not eating nothing else. I dont want to lose any plants as i have finally aqua-scaped it to my liking. I was thinking if i bought some algae wafers and fed it to the algae eaters during the nights when my lunar lights come on i can avoid them going hungry and attacking my plants. I try my best to provide my fishes with a very wide varied diet. Anyone have any advice on how to prevent them from eating my plants? All i can think of is buying some algae wafers which i will purchase later today.

 

[Rafael Dilone]

I have purchased the algae wafers and with the lunar lights on tonight i saw them eat up the 2 algae wafers right away
Hopefully this night feeding will keep them off my pants.

 

[SlyPolak]

Get different fish dude, I think when fish get a taste of "live food"(your plants)..that its real hard to prevent them from eating them again... I heard youre not supposed to have any kind of pleco with plants anyways..... If anything get a Farlowella, it cleans my plants but never harms them and it LOOVES the blanched zucchini I stick in there every night.

 

[RadaR]

Never had a problem with fish eating plants. Silver Dollars are an exception
Commonly people used to come in the LFS are accuse their fish of eating their plants but it was actually the plants dieing which in turn attracted algae to the leaves which the fish were pecking off. Feeding the algae wafers at night is a good idea.

 

[Rlon35]

Never had a problem with fish eating plants. Silver Dollars are an exception
Commonly people used to come in the LFS are accuse their fish of eating their plants but it was actually the plants dieing which in turn attracted algae to the leaves which the fish were pecking off. Feeding the algae wafers at night is a good idea.

Tio add to this, I have never even had a problem with snails eating my plants, let alone the fish species that you had listed here. If the fish are just pecking at it, it shouldn't be a big deal. If you are seeing the plants vanish, my hunch something is wrong with the plant and/or your setup.

 

[SlyPolak]

I was talking about not having plecos with plants because I heard that they are notorious for getting a taste for some "salad".

 

[Rafael Dilone]

Seems i havent been losing any leaves since i started using the algae wafers. I never meant that they ate an entire plant but maybe a piece of a leaf. There are TONS of plants in there and they havent touched tons of them. At this point if they eat away more leafs it does not matter since they are growing so fast. Thanks for the suggestion guys