Kristin Stanley
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- Joined
- Jul 17, 2019
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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!
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!