Fat Otocinclus

[LittleWatty]

I've always had a love for plecos, but cories are just too cute, and these active little otos are stealing my heart as we speak. They're hard to find in my pretty heavily planted tank, but whenever I do see them, they're darting all over the place. Its fun to watch ^.^

[lvandert]

lol agreed. I have a LFS that has long finned bristle nose, and the another store has a tank FULL of baby bristle nose.

[LittleWatty]

I've been chatting with the person who orders the fish at my local Petco (she really knows her stuff, its a breath of fresh air compared to the other idiots that work there!), and she's thinking of ordering some long finned albino bristle nose plecos! Now that would be a sight. The only reason they don't stock them often is because the other fish tend to get really nippy. She did look into ordering some pygmy or dwarf cories for me, and I think I'll love her if she ever gets them for me XD She just can't find any vendors that sell them.

[Aus]

I love my baby bristlenose! I was worried he wouldn't get enough to eat in the 3ft tank, but he's fat as mud and grazes all day on the driftwood gunk and the algae I'm encouraging with a little dose of natural sunlight every day.

He won't touch zucchini, though. Ignores it utterly.

I'm a bit worried he may not be getting all the nutrients he needs.

I love your tubby little otos. :) I'd have liked to tried them out in the strohi tank, but there was none in the store and I figured it'd take a couple of years at least for Om-nomnom (the pleco) to outgrow this tank. Now I'm not so sure.. he seems to have grown half an inch already (he was about an inch long when I got him) and 30-35 gallons may not be enough once he gets full size, from what I can tell?

Catfish in general are wonderful. I'd like to have kuhli loaches, long finned plecos, various schools of corys - I love the pandas and pygmies - and heck, why not one of those scary looking armour plated jobs from the Amazon River that needs a fifteen foot tank and a diet of newly hatched brontosaurus whelps...

Okay, maybe that's a little overboard. =P But I do want to keep otos one day.

[xShainax]

I had one die of dropsy

[LittleWatty]

Well, I found out why my otos are so fat... they're actually eating the algae wafers I drop in there! XD I just saw one nibbling at the remains of yesterday's wafer before darting off because I got too close

[lvandert]

lol that'll do it, they're little piggies

[LittleWatty]

My otos seem to have a taste for day-old algae wafers XD they won't touch it while its hard, but if its been sitting at the bottom of the tank for at least 12 hours, they might nibble at it. The closer it is to 24 hours, the more they eat it! Since they're so small, I'm only giving them one big Hakari (green) wafer every other day. There's some algae in the tank, but I don't know if they like it, so I'm giving them wafers too.