Scats W/ Live Plants?

[Dave Legacy]

Hi guys,

I'm thinking about adding a juvenille scat, probably green, into one of my tanks that will soon be heavily planted with various species of macroalgae. The tank will probably have a lot of halimeda, sargassum, a variety of red kelps, sea lettuce, etc... Will my macro be eaten at such a rate that it will be destroyed or will the plants grow too quickly to notice? Will the plants even be eaten at all? I'm not quite sure what types of vegetation they even eat.

Thanks in advance,
Dave

 

[moray]

I don't know what speed your plants grown, but in my experience scats will try to eat everything and as often as possible. The other thing is that they are shoal fish and you would need to have at least 3, they get quite large and they are serious eating machines.

 

[AMS]

Macroalgae will certainly be eaten by scats. When I had my scat tank I tried experimenting with macros, the second they hit the water the scats were on them.

 

[CFC]

Scats are aquatic garbage disposals, if its edible it will be eaten. Macro algea sounds like an expensive salad bar.

 

[Dave Legacy]

That's what I was thinking too, but a guy from the Reef Central Macro Forums told me that they'd eat all the microalgae in the tank, even right off the macro, but wouldn't munch the macro or plants. A lot of macro grows at a quick rate, but at this point I don't have anything growing, maybe I'll wait until my tank is heavily planted and established before I attempt a scat.

Thanks for the info!