besides the pleco, are there other types of fish that help maintain the tank?
are there any fish that like to scavenge the ground and look for leftover food or maybe even eat poop?
Ghost shrimp will scavange through any leftover bits and often even through the fish waste, but do not consume it.
Plecos are actually quite messy compared to many fish, and will contribute to your tank being dirty.
If you want to get something that will eat poop, look into one of these:
And these are great for keeping the sides of the tank clean:
Cory's definetly. In my first 29 gallon set up I lost my school of Neon Tetras to NTD. I replaced them with 3 Cory Juliis. I was amazed at how much less wastes I was vacuuming out during my weekly water changes.
They are also very entertaining fish. I love them.
thanks guys. i think i made a mistake, because i put some wood and plants in my tank with sand substrate, . now vacuming is a lot harder with all the stuff in the way.
That is a nice looking tank. Have the plants been in there long, b/c they seem to be receiving little light (I myself am a fan of dim tanks and haven't ventured into plants for that reason).
In order to reach under the logs, you can just use a length of 1/2" tubing to siphon wastes off of your substrate. The hose will give you better mobility than a vac head. You should clean under the driftwood, and can do so easily by lifting it up anough to run the tubing underneath it. The only tricky part is not sucking up a lot of sand.
Cool snakeheads - I don't see those too often. How big is that tank? Snakeheads generally to better in a species tank - they might eat smaller fish like cories as they get bigger. I would recommend researching some of the loaches as possible good tankmates for your snakeheads - they won't eat poo, but they'll burrow through the sand, eating any missed food and stirring up fish waste to get filtered out.
To clean the hard-to-reach spots, I find stirring the siphon tube an inch above the sand with stir up the waste and suck it up without disturbing the sand much.