Finnegan

That's me! I'm @Finnegan! Thanks!

Thanks for that, @Grassypeak. It's a 70L tank. There's currently eight each of the Endlers and CPDs. The Endlers are all male, so population growth isn't a problem. There'll be 6 otocinclus. The Endler I'm most concerned about eats pretty much non stop, the photo I posted above is about par but on occasion he's even larger than that and looks pretty much about to pop. I'm not really sure at what point over feeding becomes critically dangerous and at what point I should interfere.

Hi guys, I'm a bit of a newbie trying to slowly build up my second ever tank and first community (first one is dwarf puffers.) The idea was, and is, to build up to keeping a betta. Taking advice from a few different YouTube channels (including Cory's and Irene's) and social media platforms, we're going with Endlers, Celestial Pearls and Otos to live with it. The Endlers went in first and the plan is to add the smaller fish in a species at a time with a couple of weeks between, partly to let them settle, partly so the bioload grows gradually and partly to give us chance to learn how to care for each as we go along. So, the Endlers have had the new tank diatom / algae bloom to deal with and they seem to have absolutely loved it. It seems to be like living in an all you can eat buffet, they've been gorging themselves. Because we're a little bit new at this and because I've not been entirely sure what the right balance is, I've still been feeding them some crushed up flake most days as well. Problem is that slowly but surely a couple of them have gotten, well, "fat." They look a little over fed and possibly constipated. I've tried blanched pea but the difference has been a bit minimal. Now, probably a bit naively, before getting this completely under control, we've added the CPDs and I've kinda realised the problem I've now got and this is where I could really do with some advice. I need to somehow balance feeding so that the CPDs get enough without over feeding the Endlers. Obviously, one option is to go a bit nuclear fighting the algae and scrub everything off to take the food source away but I'm partly concerned about that cleansing also wiping out beneficial bacteria on those surface areas and also, it would be nice for some of it to still be there when the otos arrive so they aren't entirely reliant on wafers and can enjoy some natural foraging. Attached below is a picture of the the one that won't stop eating the most. I'm extremely anxious I'm stuck between either over feeding them to death or starving the CPDs.