Fish that will eat plant debris (hornwort)

[ddoan]

Is there a fish that will eat hornwort debris readily? I have quite a bit and want some help cleaning it out. I have no algae, my amonia is 0 as well as my nitrite. My nitrate is below 5 according to the hagen test kit.

Thanks,
Don

[OrionGirl]

Snails will clean up plant debris, after it has begun to break down a bit. Most fish that will eat this kind of stuff will also eat the plant itself. You may want to look into getting a prefilter on a power head--the litter gets sucked onto the filter, which can be easily removed and rinsed.

[ddoan]

Any particular fish? I was thinking about getting a couple of Pseudotropheus socolofi aka Powder Blue Cichlids, but they will a month old and I don't know how they'll even touch the debris. I also have a dwarf neon puffer that likes snails dearly. Adding snails will be hard since they disappear readily.

-Don

[OrionGirl]

I'm not that familiar with cichlids--you may want to post in the Cichlid forum and see what they can tell you.

Dwarf neon puffer? Have a scientific name for that? I have dwarf puffers, so know what you mean about snails vanishing. Of course, they can also be very abusive to just about any fish--I had to remove the cories from my tank because the puffers were beating the heck out of their fins.

[delmore]

Plants "lock up" nitrates. One way to get rid of nitrates is to cull the dying plants from your tank.

[PumaWard]

I when I had dwarf gourami that they used to eat dead/dying pieces of my hornwart. Don't put them in there though if you're puffer will beat the living daylights out of them ;)