Couple questions with bn pleco

The babies and the pair should be okay together. The 29 gallon might be a little cramped for 2 adult males.

This is what happened to my adult female bn when I added a male to her tank. And it's a 125 gal tank!! I'd be careful about putting them all together in a small tank. But my experience is pretty limited. I've had the female for several years, the male is new.

Females do get small bristles, just not the big bristles that mature males get.

I have found out the hard way that ABN will eat RCS. I have 2 males and about 7 females in a 29( and several different size baby ABNs) with TONS of plants, wood, pipe, multi level caves etc. The only time I see them all is when I dump in alot of food. I must admit but I do over feed. Also in the tank is 10 corries and some baby apple snails. Corries breed every once in a while.

FixxYurFace - I would not put your younger pair in the same tank as the breeding pair. Males will definitely fight over breeding with the females. At a minimum, the males will pester each other mercilessly when one's about to breed and the other one isn't. Even in a large heavily planted, 2 cave 75G tank. Also, the females select the male. Both males together with the females, chances are very good that the two females will breed with the alpha male and the other male will be ignored by them. While there's a slight change, depending only on the personality of the male fish, that you could keep a couple of breeding groups together in the same large tank where you can separate the caves out of view from each male, I don't see that happening in a small 29G.

Wren, while I know they can get pretty battered up and even killed when fighting, there's just no way a bristlenose with a sucker mouth could take a chunk out of another fish ..... your female definitely looks like a chunk has been bitten out of her.

Sixis - how can you be sure it's the plecos eating the shrimp and not the cories? I just don't see plecos with their sucker mouths eating shrimp. Maybe if the shrimp babies didn't get out of the way fast enough they could be sucked in to the pleco's mouth. With cories....they'd see any small moving living object as maybe live food and go for it, even their own young.

I have one 75 gal. with cherries and plecos in it, I haven't noticed that they have eaten any of the cherries.

pinkertd said:

Wren, while I know they can get pretty battered up and even killed when fighting, there's just no way a bristlenose with a sucker mouth could take a chunk out of another fish ..... your female definitely looks like a chunk has been bitten out of her.

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Oh, it was definitely from the male bn. They were side by side kind of thrashing back and forth. And they had those retractable spines out. Ouch. All of the damage was done with the spines, not the mouth. It looked bad, but she did heal quickly. I was just surprised that there was that kind of aggression at all! I didn't realize they could/would kill each other. So far they seem to have worked things out...