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How do you deal with all the pleco poop?


mgudyka
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I will cut to the chase. How do you deal with all the waste a pleco produces? When I was treating my tank for ich, I actually sort of enjoyed it because the daily water changes meant I could gravel val and clean up the poop for the day. There is lots of poop. Maybe I am putting the blame on the plecos when it's a combination of everyone in the tank (but the poop all looks like it came from the pleco who leaves droppings in all his favorite places to hang out).

But goodness gracious me, there is so much poop. 

My 29 gallon tank with more fish doesn't look this poopy between my weekly water changes. This 75 looks very poopy and I last gravel vaccd on Wednesday.

If there a trick to dealing with it? Or am I just going to have to let go and deal with it?

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We feed Ancistrus _very sparingly_ unless we are trying to breed them, or bulk up their size. They must forage for their own food in most of our planted tanks. Call it cruel... it’s just how it goes. They survive, and eat plenty, but there’s less waste.

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Hello, this is your big box pet store representative again! Plecos are cleaner fish that will eat all the algae and leftovers in your tank, including the poop that accumulates along the bottom of the aquarium! They will even eat their own poop! No need to do any maintenence on your tank when you have one of these!

Okay all jokes aside, you are right they were surprisingly the biggest waste producer when I had them in my aquarium. The reason for this is because they are (mostly) herbivorous, and will spend all of their time grazing off of the algae, biofilm, and aufwuchs. Therefore, they can be fed a bit more lightly as @Fish Folk suggested. I don't know of any other solutions, sorry.

I hope this helped!

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35 minutes ago, lefty o said:

have substrate the poop blends in with.

My largest pleco lives on a bed of white sand. I used to try and vac things every week, but the shrimp colony has gotten so large that I can't do much vaccing without fear of sucking up little shrimplets. These days, I just live with it. It does break down over time, occasionally I'll stir some of that mess up when I do tank maintenance so the filter can pull it out. They're just poop machines.

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