Pleco, part ii

Pleco, Part II

Feeding Suckermouth Catfish
First a general statement
Plecos, Loricariids, are not coprophagous scavengers. That is a six-bit way of saying that they do not eat or clean up fish poop. Rather the opposite, they are prolific poop generators. If a scavenger of fish poop is what you want, a Scat is the only one I know. But they get rather large and like brackish to marine conditions.More...
Plecos also will not do well with only the leftovers from the other fish. Hopefully there will not be enough of that to keep them going, and it is not likely to be an adequate diet. These fish have evolved a rasping mouth to enable them to scrape algae from surfaces, or the pulp of fruit, or even wood itself -- not just algae from the wood, but to eat and get nourishment from the wood.
Much of their food is relatively high bulk/low food value. They are "engineered" to process a larger quantity of material than many other fish in order to get equal food value. Obviously this ability to exploit a low-nutrition food

 

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