Rubberlip plecos keep dying :’(

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Kristin Stanley

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I’ve owned two rubber lipped plecos in the last five months and both of them ended up belly up. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, so I came here for advice. I have a 29 gallon freshwater tank with nine white cloud minnows and six Danios. I have a mixture of gravel and dime sized flat glass stones, mostly fake plants, one real driftwood, and one real plant growing from the driftwood. There are lots of hiding places and caves. The first pleco I got back in March did a great job of sucking on the glass and stones (we didn’t have the driftwood yet) and he found a great hiding place during the day in one of the caves. But after about a month, he did a great job on the glass but then he would swim all around the tank day and night and I didn’t realize that he was starving. I would drop algae wafers in there but I never saw him eat one, they just disintegrated on the gravel. I found him dead in the cave back in June. So after he died I did a lot more research and found out that I should have been feeding him a more varied diet, including real vegetables and protein. So at the end of June we got the driftwood from the pet store (it was in a tank with water and no fish at the store) and got new rubber lip pleco, this time this one was a bit bigger than the first. He loved sucking on the driftwood, but I never saw him sucking on the glass walls. He stayed on the bottom, sucked on the driftwood, and sucked on the glass rocks. I tried dropping in algae wafers after turning out the light at night, I tried zucchini, cucumber, freeze dried shrimp… But I never saw him eat a darn thing. This morning I found him belly up in the bottom of the tank. I also thought I was doing a decent job keeping the tank clean. I never clean the glass because I thought he would do that (and the glass looks perfectly clean anyway). But once a week I suck up the poop out of the rocks and gravel and change out 10 to 20% of the tank water. I have bubble rock and a filter and have changed out the carbon filter about once per month and I rub the gunk off of it in the tank water in the bucket every time I change out the water.
Nitrates- around 20
Nitrites- 0
Hardness- 25 (very soft)
Alkalinity- 180
pH- around 7.8
I really don’t know why I keep killing plecos. The other fish seem happy and healthy! Help!
 
Hi and welcome to the forum :)

What is the ammonia level in the tank?
What sort of filter do you have and how do you clean it?
What do the fish look like when they die?
 
Hi and welcome to the forum :)

What is the ammonia level in the tank?
What sort of filter do you have and how do you clean it?
What do the fish look like when they die?

Thanks for the welcome! According to the “ammonia alert” thing by Seachem that is sticking inside my tank, my ammonia level is less than .02 ppm and in the “safe” section of the pie chart. I’m still a beginner when it come to owning fish, so all I know is that I have a petcobrand filter rated up to 30 gallons. It takes a large carbon filter replacement. On the back of the box for the replacement cartridges, it claims it has a three stage filtration… Mechanical, chemical, biological. I use a toothbrush that has never been used on anything else but the Fishtank and I scrub around the inside of the filter housing, but not the part where the water pours into the tank because I thought that was the biological filter and it has good bacteria on it that I don’t want to scrub off. When the fish were found dead, they were upside down and their skin was lighter colored than when they were alive. But I’ve had the Minnows and Danios in there since March and they’re all still alive and have never shown distress.
 
Oh, on a possibly related note, may be unrelated but I have no idea, the live plant that is growing out of the driftwood that I put in there a month ago is not looking too great. The edges are turning brown, one of the leaves has died, and a couple look like they have dark spots on them. Once a week I put in the recommended amount of “Flourish” by Seachem to supplement the plant. Crap... is that what killed my pleco??
 
Once a week I put in the recommended amount of “Flourish” by Seachem to supplement the plant. Crap... is that what killed my pleco?
Possibly. Did you add the flourish just before they died? It might have overdosed.

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You can buy round/ cylindrical sponges for some brands of internal power filters. They have a hole through the centre and can be put over the intake strainer of most external power filters.

You can buy rectangular sponges for other brands of filter and use a pair of scissors to cut them to fit inside your filter. Sponges last for years and don't need replacing. Every couple of weeks you wash them out in a bucket of tank water and re-use them.

The filter pad can be cut open and you throw the carbon out and squeeze the pad out in a bucket of tank water before using it.

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Post a picture of the plant. If the pictures are too big for the website, set the camera's resolution to its lowest setting and take some more. The lower resolution will make the images smaller and they should fit on this website. Check the pictures on your pc and find a couple that are clear and show the problem, and post them here. Make sure you turn the camera's resolution back up after you have taken the pics otherwise all your pictures will be small.
 
Can I ask which "Flourish" you used? There are several Flourishes made by Seachem. Was there anything written on the bottle after the word Flourish, even in much smaller writing?
 
I added the flourish on Sunday when I cleaned the poo from the substrate and replaced 30% of the water and the pleco died sometime between 10pm last night and 6:45am today. There are no little words after the big, bold “Flourish” on the bottle so I know it’s just the basic one not Flourish Nitrogen, Flourush Phosphorus, or Flourish Potassium. It says to add 5ml per 60 gallons once/twice per week. So I add 2.5ml once per week. Here’s a picture of the live plant growing from the driftwood.
 

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I also have a heater keeping the water at 74 degrees. If I didn’t have a heater the water would stay around 68 degrees.
 

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I have a 5 year daughter and a 2 year old daughter... I let them pick the decorations Don’t judge hahaha
 
So am I to assume that the plecos were already sick from the pet store? I don’t think I did anything wrong… I do a regular water change, I use Prime water conditioner with every water change, I dropped in a Pleco wafer after dark every couple of days, I sprinkled in shrimp pellets after dark about twice per week, I tried zucchini and cucumber slices... it was a big bummer that I would put food in there after turning on the light in the morning only to find that the food was still there and hadn’t been eaten.
 
If the fish lived in your tank for a month or more, then it was not sick at the shop and something in the tank killed them. Fish that are sick at the shop usually die within a week of you getting them.

Any ammonia in the water will cause problems and the only safe level is 0.0ppm. In water with a pH above 7.0, the ammonia becomes more toxic and the higher the pH, the more toxic the ammonia becomes. If your pH is 7.8 and there was ammonia in the water, it would have contributed to the fish's demise.
 
Good to know! Thanks! The water in my area is very hard and has extremely high alkalinity. We have a water softener, so that’s the water I use for the tank. The tank pH is currently around 7.4, but the alkalinity always registers pretty high. Maybe I should give up on plecos and just focus on the “hard to kill” fish ;)
 
Water softeners can cause problems too. Some replace the calcium with sodium, which is bad for soft water fishes like plecos.

Depending on what the general hardness (GH) is before it is softened, you might be better off using it without softening it. Otherwise look for a reverse osmosis unit to soften it, but it depends on how hard it actually is.
 
Water softeners can cause problems too. Some replace the calcium with sodium, which is bad for soft water fishes like plecos.

Depending on what the general hardness (GH) is before it is softened, you might be better off using it without softening it. Otherwise look for a reverse osmosis unit to soften it, but it depends on how hard it actually is.
YIKES!! I didn’t even think about that!! I’ll test the water from the kitchen sink (cold tap from that faucet is not softened) and compare it with the water from the sink near the fish tank (which I always use for the tank water).
 

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