What do you feed your rubberlip plec?

[bsmith]

Just seeing what the consensus is.

[GoldLenny]

Not much of a consensus.. is there? ;-)

First, make sure of what you have since there are LOTS of errors made when selling plecos when only using a common name... and the "rubberlip" is one of the biggest.

When you want to know what they like in nature, check Fishbase http://www.fishbase.org/search.php or the profiles on Mongabay http://fish.Mongabay.com Also specialty sites like PlanetCatfish or ScotCat will have more profiles for catfish than most other sites.

Here'a s Bulldog Pleco aka Rubbernose Pleco (which also has big rubbery looking lips and has been called a Rubberlipped Pleco by some distributors.
http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/species.php?species_id=407

Here's what is commonly called a Rubber Pleco.
http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/species.php?species_id=82

Here's their list of all "R" named plecos.
http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/common_names.php?letter=r (http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/common_names.php?letter=r)

As you see, PlanetCatfish doesn't list a profile for a common name, Rubberlip pleco... but if you type in Rubber in the little search field at the top right of the Alpha page, you'll get a fly-out pictorial and list of catfish with Rubber in their name. A quick glance shows most are variants of Rubber Pleco or Rubbernose Pleco.

Here's a snip from another thread...
If you're saying rubberlip I imagine you're talking about the kind of pleco that PetSmart usually sells. Its really hard to identify what pleco they're actually selling, they seem to just get any variety of Chaetostoma and label it a rubberlip.

One of the two profiles I listed above are from Chaetostoma sp. but there are many more in that Genera so look through all the other Chaetostoma sp. profiles and see if you can verify what you have.

Here's Mongabay's page on Bulldog Plecos... encompassing all of the Chaetostoma sp.
http://fish.mongabay.com/species/Chaetostoma.html Here's what they have for FOOD: Some species may graze on algae, although others will not. Food tablets; frozen crustaceans; vegetarian foods; vegetables; peas; live; Tubifex , crustaceans.

If you go to http://www.Fishbase.org and type in Chaetostoma in the Genus field, you should get a list of the profiles they have... right now the search seems to hanging for me so they might have a temporary server issue.

Here's PlanetCatfish list of Chaetostoma sp.
http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/index.php?genus_search_type=is&genus=chaetostoma&species_search_type=is&species=&task=Search

[bsmith]

Thanks for the response. I saw that there was no rubberlip on planet catfish too, but I found the others. Here is a pic of it. And I did get it from petsmart.

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r288/bsmith782/rubberlip.jpg

[GoldLenny]

You'll have to wait till it grows more in order to possibly ID it for most plecos. Some are easier to ID as juvis, others are not so easy. You could go through all of the pictures on each of the Chaetostoma sp. profiles until you find some juvi pics that look just like yours... but you might not find any since they often change quite a bit from juvi to adult.

When I adopted a 10G tank with a 4" pleco, 2 Blue Gouramis, a small school of Zebra Danios and a small school of Buenos Aires Tetras in it... severely overstocked since the pleco turned out to be a Liposarcus pardalis... one of the "common pleco" species. But since it was so stunted in the 10G tank after 2 years, the folks on CP and PlecoFanatics couldn't tell what I had for about a year after I moved him into my 65G tank where he grew from that little 4" runt of a pleco into a 10" L. pardalis and then we could ID him. Since Katrina had hit in the interim, I had to rehome him to my LFS since he was too big for my 65G by that point. They sold him the next day to a BIG tank owner so hopefully he's still growing towards that 18" to 24" mark!