My 2 pleco's (approx 6+ years old each and about 6-8 inches) both just died over the weekend and will be missed.
Hoover and Eureka were THE 'explicative' at keeping my tank pristine the last half a dozen years.
The main reason posting is to get some info on why they may have died. The tank is (obviously by the ages etc) well established and in good working condition with many various other tropical community tank style fish such as some tetra, zebra, and some various different types of molly fish.
Tank size is approx 50 gal and like I said above well established and maintained.
They pleco pretty much ate whatever they wanted in the way of algae in the tank and on occaision would get a small leaf of lettuce or some other green type vegetation placed into the tank for them along with some dry sinking algae disks, this has been their diet for the last 6+ years with no problems.
Thursday last week my gf noted even though they were in the usual "hanging out" mode on the side of the tank that one of them just did not look too well and I told her they looked fine to me, plopped a couple algae disks in the tank and all was gravy. On Saturday on returning home from work I noticed that one of them was laying on the bottom of the tank not moving or breathing so I picked him out of the tank and discarded of the corpse, noting nothing unusual about the fish indicating any type of disease or illness I attributed the death to general old age, as I have no idea how long a pleco can live. Then on Sunday I notice my other one has some small whiteish patches on its nose almost looking like it had scraped away the skin and the exposed area had begun to form an ich'ish looking white area, the fish was dead within a couple hours. I did lose one of my sunset platy this weekend as well at which point I began to notice in the bottom of the tank everywhere there had been algae disks dropped in on Thursday there was this white fuzzy slimey looking masses sprouting up everywhere.
The best description I can give would almost be like a small living slimey cotton ball it looked slimey but yet had a fuzzy appearance to it. It seems to me like there was something wrong with the algae disks or they had some kind of a reation to the water for some reason. They were Hikari Tropical Algae Wafers for Pleco and Algae Eaters, the expiration date on the package (which is in some sort of Japanese or something) is listed as B.07
(some foreign text here)06.10
I have had them for about 6 months maybe as I had run out of the other kind I used to have and picked these up at my local PetSmart at the time.
They had been eating these along with the normal diet above and had no problems until I fed them on Thuraday but like I said my gf thought one of them "did not look well" but I saw nothing out of the ordinary on the first one when it passed.
Anyone had any experience similar to this or know of a possible cause?
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply, I really wanna know what happened to my pleco.......
wanted to post a pic I got of the one pleco that was left and you can notice the small whiteish spots on it's nose this was the beginning of the end.
Hoover and Eureka were THE 'explicative' at keeping my tank pristine the last half a dozen years.
The main reason posting is to get some info on why they may have died. The tank is (obviously by the ages etc) well established and in good working condition with many various other tropical community tank style fish such as some tetra, zebra, and some various different types of molly fish.
Tank size is approx 50 gal and like I said above well established and maintained.
They pleco pretty much ate whatever they wanted in the way of algae in the tank and on occaision would get a small leaf of lettuce or some other green type vegetation placed into the tank for them along with some dry sinking algae disks, this has been their diet for the last 6+ years with no problems.
Thursday last week my gf noted even though they were in the usual "hanging out" mode on the side of the tank that one of them just did not look too well and I told her they looked fine to me, plopped a couple algae disks in the tank and all was gravy. On Saturday on returning home from work I noticed that one of them was laying on the bottom of the tank not moving or breathing so I picked him out of the tank and discarded of the corpse, noting nothing unusual about the fish indicating any type of disease or illness I attributed the death to general old age, as I have no idea how long a pleco can live. Then on Sunday I notice my other one has some small whiteish patches on its nose almost looking like it had scraped away the skin and the exposed area had begun to form an ich'ish looking white area, the fish was dead within a couple hours. I did lose one of my sunset platy this weekend as well at which point I began to notice in the bottom of the tank everywhere there had been algae disks dropped in on Thursday there was this white fuzzy slimey looking masses sprouting up everywhere.
The best description I can give would almost be like a small living slimey cotton ball it looked slimey but yet had a fuzzy appearance to it. It seems to me like there was something wrong with the algae disks or they had some kind of a reation to the water for some reason. They were Hikari Tropical Algae Wafers for Pleco and Algae Eaters, the expiration date on the package (which is in some sort of Japanese or something) is listed as B.07
(some foreign text here)06.10
I have had them for about 6 months maybe as I had run out of the other kind I used to have and picked these up at my local PetSmart at the time.
They had been eating these along with the normal diet above and had no problems until I fed them on Thuraday but like I said my gf thought one of them "did not look well" but I saw nothing out of the ordinary on the first one when it passed.
Anyone had any experience similar to this or know of a possible cause?
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply, I really wanna know what happened to my pleco.......
wanted to post a pic I got of the one pleco that was left and you can notice the small whiteish spots on it's nose this was the beginning of the end.