Cannot keep a pleco alive...

Plecos don't like salt.

Scaleless fish like catfish also do not like medication.

Make sure you feed them more than flake food, algae/shrimp wafers, the green and brown/orange hikari bags.

Keep your temp around 76-78 and keep the water well oxygenated with airstone or something else.

Do all that and you shouldn't have many problems. I've bred bristlenose plecos in a 30gallon with lots of current, half tap half ro water, 78 degrees I think, feed them algae wafers and frozen bloodworms (would not breed without the bloodworms), and I also had 7 or 8 pieces of driftwood in that tank. Weekly 10 gallon water changes. If I didn't change the water every week the water was brown, really brown from all the driftwood. I had a 400gph powerhead with no filter (just strainer), a 125gph powerhead with just a strainer and aeration, and an emporer 400 (canister wouldv'e been better). Also kept a couple gold nuggets in this tank for a while, I had three total, 2 lived for about a year and 1 lived for about a week.

Also wild caught fish may have parasites and gill flukes that come with them and may shorten their lives.
 
Plecos are fine in low levels of salt for a short time--my bristlenose were in heavily salted water for about 6 weeks--no problems. Also, rubber and bristlenose are seldom wild caught fish--these are both readily bred commercially. If the fish come from Denizens, I can almost gaurantee the bristlenose was bred locally.
 
Yep, I bought the most recent bristlenose at Denizens. The first bristlenose was from D&G (both are shops I remember shopping at when I was little). I'll avoid adding salt in future water changes since it isn't currently needed for anything.
 
I had ich in a tank and I also had a rubber-lipped pleco.

He didn't survive, and I presume it was the Coppersafe med I used. I replaced him after the ich was gone with another RL pleco and he also met his demise.

Personally, I think it was the Coppersafe. It could have been a bad bacteria that was in the tank. I don't know what med you used, and I would be curious to know.

I also added salt to the tank, but just one dose of aquarium salt.

NOTE: I'm assuming Rubbernose and Rubber-lipped are the same type of pleco.:cool:
 
From the TFH Atlas of Freshwater and Marine Catfishes in regards to Loricariidae

" Almost all species are primary freshwater fishes; that is, they have almost no tolerance for salt."

"Most of the exceptions to the strictly freshwater distributions occur in Ancistrus and Hypostomus, these genera being found at times in slightly brackish waters of riverine estuaries."

So a bristlenose (Ancistrus Temmincki) can tolerate more salt that the rubbernose/rubberlip which I believe is Chaetostoma, which are from fast flowing mountain streams far from the saltwater.

I couldn't find anything in my short search in regards to medication though.

You know the biggest thing in keeping fish is to have a consistent schedule, and don't make any drastic changes to the water chemisty, temprature or the biological filtration (bacteria beds/substrate). I change water weekly normally, usually 10 gallons in my 58 and when I had that 30 setup, 10 in that too (but that's cause I fed them a bunch to get them to breed).

Also some people think a water change is completely draining all water and cleaning up the rocks and stuff, that's actually a bad thing to do because that is a drastic change. The only reason you are changing the water is to remove nitrates, the crap in the substrate is worth it to clean out to, I'm pretty sure that stuff has higher concentrations of nitrates.

If i'm unable to remove the crap off of the substrate I just change water more frequently to keep the nitrate levels down. If you're making drastic changes you're not really helping your tank become established.

If you don't want to make a lot of water changes just keep the quantity of fish down.

Most importantly though it's nice you see you are trying to get a small pleco for your small tank, kudos to you for doing the research.

I think I've heard that ich is always present and it's the stress of the fish that allow the ich to take advantage of them. Stress is caused by drastic changes among other things.

Your fish load doesn't seem to bad, your filtration seems ok, just try to keep the water good and consistant and you should be alright.
 
Ich is not always present in a tank. It is a specific parasitic infection. While fish can have a sub-clinical infection, and display few if any visible signs, fish can be clean of infection, and no matter how stressed, will not develop a clinical infection. The parasite has to be present for that to happen.
 
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