I am here for plecos and i can help

[Armadillo_Del_Rio]

If anyone needs help from experiance of pleco enjoyment ask i am here.

[eklikewhoa]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

have you bred any of you plecos?

[Armadillo_Del_Rio]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

i want to but i want so many others, so space is limited when you have many different kinds and live in an apartment.

I am thinking of breeding Broken line royals when i get a house, and BN's when my 10 gallon is cleaned.

[islander]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

Howdy,

OK, here goes... I have lots of questions:

At what age or size do the dwarf albino bristle nose and brown long fin breed?  Can they easily be bred to each other?  Ours are 6-8 months old and the males are about 4" and females about 3".  Can they breed in a colony of 1 male to two females in a 20 gallon tank?  Is it OK to have guppies or swordtails in the tank with them while they breed?  I have read about them needing caves to breed, what else needs to be done to trick them into breeding? Thanks, ken

[Armadillo_Del_Rio]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

I would problay wait til they are 10 months to a year. and are about 3-5" . If your long fin and albinos are of the same species. And if they could recognize each other as being prime mates then you shouldn't have problems. Usally the bigger the bristles its a male. And you could use anythinf from broken clay pots to cave for their breeding. Try changing the temp a little lower to make it seem it's winter just a couple of degrees not 10 or something drastic, and have a low ~ Ph 6.5. and a colony would be a good start.

[eklikewhoa]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

for caves i have some slate ones i got off aquabid or you  could use the clay ones from cichlidbreeding.com

[islander]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

Howdy,

Thank you for answering our questions; it sounds like we don't need to rush them but let the plecos grow out more and try breeding in spring.  We have some small pieces of slate that we can make caves with and clay pots.  We have a couple pieces of drift would that are like caves, if we need to we could put pvc pipes in to make cells.  

Do we need to change their diet at all; they are eating summer squash, canned string beans, shrimp pellets, flake food that goes to bottom and crushed snails, plus there are live plants in the tank.  Later, ken

[Armadillo_Del_Rio]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

That's one good diet for them, and they will do fine i am sure of it.

[Brownsnoutuk]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

do you know the name of the two plecos i have?
I bought them off this site but i never knew for sure what they were.

[eklikewhoa]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

here's what i think they are

http://planetcatfish.com/catelog/species.php?species_id=179

http://planetcatfish.com/catelog/species.php?species_id=735

here's a list of peckoltia's that they could possibly be and if you look a lot of them are very similar so distinguishing them apart would be kinda hard.

planet catfish peckoltia list

[Brownsnoutuk]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

Yeah thats the site i used to look them up when i first got them. Ive had them listed as tiger and leopard in my signature since i bought them, i justed wanted to make sure that was right.

[Mzungu]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

You bought them off fishbox? Did the original owner know what they were? The smaller one looks like a clown pleco, too... :think:  

[Armadillo_Del_Rio]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

The bottom one looks like a clown pleco and the other pleco is a Peckolita (L?, can you get a better pick?) for sure. I would put wood in the tank for the clown.

[eklikewhoa]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

They were bought off me and I bought them as accidents mixed in a order from a LFS.

[bristlenosedude]

Re: I am here for plecos and i can help

Hey brownsnoutuk, gald to hear you are interested in bristlenose plecos. They are a great little fish that should be in everyones tank. I can't see your pictures but they do breed best in closed end tubes. I got mine from Rosenthal Pottery, he sells on aquabid, and has a web site. The female lays eggs in the back of the tube and the male stays in there blocking the entrance. He will not let other fish to the eggs. I have had hundreds of spawns and only 2 were in flower pots, they like the confined space better. I spawn them in groups, 1-2 males and 6-8 females. The males will spawn with multiple females and there will always be gravid females when you take the babies. When the fry are free swimming in the tube, I hang a net in the tank and slosh the babies in to it. Dad usually stays in the tube, just put it back into the tank and he will do his thing again. I usually had 2000 fry when I lived in Arlington, there was something majic in my water there. Since I moved, the spawning has slowed a bit. You don't need to keep them alone, I have spawned them with everything, including fronts in tanks from 10 gal to 200 gal. Just take the babies before they get out of the tube. Hope this helps some, the hardest thing is to get the adults, just buy a bunch of fry and grow them out.

I posted this in another thread in this section. The browns, long fins, albino's or any combination will interbreed. You often see fish offer that say "with long fin gene" meaning they had different parent types. Just throw them together and wait, once they get going, you will have plenty of them. I would hate to guess how many I have sold, but it is up in the thousands. They need a tight cave and can be kept with any fish, no reason to have a species only tank.