Are Plecos Scaleless?

Are bn plecos counted as a scaleless fish? google didn’t have a definitive answer but handy to know as some treatments cannot be used in tanks with scaleless fish

Yes they are.
what are you treating for?

thank you! google only referred to catfish and didn’t have much to say about plecos. nothing so far but was looking at velvet treatments yesterday and that was how i came across it

For aquarium medication purposes, a scaleless fish fits into the following groups:
1) Catfish - suckermouth like bristlenose, plecos, Otocinclus, Peckoltias, etc; Corydoras; eeltail catfish; salmontail or forktail catfish; and any other catfish out there. Also the common Chinese algae eater.

2) Eels - spiny nose, tyretrack, fire or any other type of eel.

3) Loaches - Botias like clown, yoyo and dwarf loaches, Khulis, and any type of loach.

4) Elephant nose and other Mormyrids.

5) Black Ghost knife fish and other types of knife fish.

6) Galaxias and Galaxiellas from Australia, New Zealand and some areas in South America. This also includes Lepidogalaxias salamandroides from Wetern Australia.

7) Nightfish (Bostockia porosa) from Western Australia and its relatives from the east coast of Australia.

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If your fish have whitespot of velvet, you can treat it with heat instead of chemical medications. Raise the water temperature to 30C (86F) and keep it there for 2 weeks. The parasites can't survive at 30C and die.

The following link has information about whitespot, but velvet is treated the same way.

Aussie_Bristle said:

Yes they are.
what are you treating for?

Click to expand...

I agree. BNP are scaleless.

thanks guys, learning new things every day! we also have some pleco babies now, about 18 of them so sure i’ll be back with plenty of questions ‍

If you would post a picture of them I would be interested in seeing it. My last pleco grew to around a foot long.

If you have suckermouth catfish, make sure you have some driftwood in the tank for them to eat. And increase the lighting on the tank to encourage algae to grow on the glass and ornaments for them to eat.

ok they’re hard to get a photo of, they’re about 6 days old now and probably about a cm long