Somewhere or other in my computer I have a picture of a newborn guppy fry hiding between nose and lip of an 18 inch pleco. If he was gonna eat him, he would have. In a nutshell, pleco are oppertunity feeders. They don't chase down food, they don't ambush food. They find it, and then they eat it. If what they find tries to swim off when they go to lunch, it pretty much gets away, unless it's a large, slow, vertical fish, and the pleco is desperately starved. They don't like live foods much at all, with the exception of a few meat eaters, who take shrimp and snails.
As posted in this thread before, get him if you think he's a cool fish, know he's going to grow big, and are willing to keep him fed and clean. Don't get him if you just want clean up crew. A common pleco can be a really nifty fish if you want something you can handfeed zuchini, watch grow, and have as your centerpiece big fish. Not so good if you want a low matienence fish you just drop some flake on and don't have to clean up after.
