I was doing a water change today, and found my pleco dead at the back of the tank. I worked today, but I know he was alive last night, so he's died in the last 12 hours. All the other fish seem fine, and I just got my nitrates down to a level of 10 ppm. I had a high nitrate problem, so I've been doing water changes every second day to lower it. Could the water changes (about 30-40% every two days) have been too stressful on him? Oh, the PH is 7.2, I just checked it. Also, the tank is not planted, and is 20 gallons. In it are some neon tetras, 2 strawberry tetras, 2 platy's, 2 serpae tetras, a cory, and two swordtails. All the fish are quite small. Thank you.
Dead pleco
- Thread starter sdb
- Start date
Water changes should not have been a problem-what kind of food was he getting? Some tanks, especially new ones may not have enough algae for a pleco to survive without supplemental feeding.
I have (or hopefully had) a bad algae problem, probably due to the high nitrates I was dealing with, or so someone suggested on here. Anyway, I was constantly cleaning plants and the tank glass because of the algae. The pleco never seemed to do any algae cleaning, except for the first day or two after I got him. I mean, he did do some, but not much. I only had him about 3 weeks.
Water changes were a problem, if not the sole problem. The tank was in OTS and pulled out too fast. See the other thread on the tank.
Agreed with RTR. Your other thread said that you were doing water changes every other day... that is going too fast for a tank suffering from OTS. Generally, people take many weeks to pull a tank out of OTS.
-Richer
-Richer