ottos???

[Lupin]

The stocks sound fine with otos. Rachel, if I might suggest, you start culturing your own algae for these fish in case you run out of diatoms. What you need is a clean bucket, fishfood, water (lol, of course) and a few small smooth white rocks.

Place the rocks in the bucket full of water and place the bucket under direct sunlight. Add a pinch of fishfood as your source of ammonia. In a few days, you should be able to grow green algae on the rocks. Use them alternately and put an algae-coated rock in the tank for the otos to eat. Once used up, return the "clean" rock to the bucket to continue production of algae and use another algae-coated rock. This is how I provide my hillstream loaches enough algae supply and it really works.

 

[rachelmayt]

that is a good idea, do you think that I could keep it outside?? My cats would have a field day with a bucket of rocks and water, hehehe!!
thanks again!!

 

[Lupin]

that is a good idea, do you think that I could keep it outside?? My cats would have a field day with a bucket of rocks and water, hehehe!!
thanks again!!

Of course, you could.

 

[Plecosterone]

They are also pretty sensitive to water quality. I always lose 2-3 out of 10 when introducing them to my well established tanks. But I also lose a lot of Lemon tertras for some reason. These 2 are the only ones that tend to give me a large die-off rate.

 

[rcervel]

I have 4 otos in my 29. At first I thought I'd have enough algae to keep them satisfied, but in about 2-3 days they had completely cleaned the tank. It's been several months since I purchased them and they still seem fine, always scurrying around the tank. I place algae wafers and blanched Zucchini every one in a while, though I'm not sure if they even eat them, sometimes I find them chowing down on the zucchini when my Bristlenose Pleco doesn't get to it first.

As far as sensitivity, I haven't lost any since I got them 3-4 months ago, they got through a brief bought of Ich and came out unscathed and seem happy and healthy and active.

 

[DavidZ]

The zucchini works I micro a small chunk no skin for 30sec and drop it in the tank.

 

[rachelmayt]

Well I went out and bought 3 of them, they sure are cute little things. They are smaller than my other fish. I hope they all get along well. I bought some small wafers to start putting in the tank tonight, to acclimate it now. Maybe it will be easier to transition them. Wish me luck!!

 

[rcervel]

When I got my otos, they got to work eating the brown diatom algae right away, it must have seemed like heaven to them.

 

[typezero]

Could you do the rock in the bucket way of growing algae in the winter?

 

[Aislinn]

Especially in the beginning, it helps to get the wafers up on the wall of the tank, like hanging from a suction cup by fishing line or something. The big problem with transferring otos to alternate food sources isn't necessarily that they're too picky to eat other things (although they definitely do prefer real algae to anything else) but more that they just plain don't recognize veggies and wafers as food sources at first. The easiest way to overcome this is to put the veggies or wafers in a spot where they'll kind of bump into them, and hopefully they'll be interested and start eating them. That's what worked for me in the beginning, anyway, and now mine will eat wafers and any green vegetable.