Not So Common, Common Pleco

[JMatthew]

This is my 9 inch Common Pleco I adopted about a month ago. When I feed the African Leaf Fish and Gourami in the tank he will swim to the surface on the glass and then using his tail push and wiggle his way out until he is able to eat from the surface with the rest of the fish! I've never seen this before. He's almost gotten far enough over in the past that I think he believes he's an Upside-Down Catfish - not a "common" Pleco after all???

 

[Aequora]

Regardless of whatever he thinks he is, he's a beauty.

 

[Darkstar]

Probably means not enough food is reaching the bottom so he's having to swim to the top to find food.

 

[skippy_49nz]

I would agree with Darkstar. I have a royal which will do this if I don't feed it for a couple of days. It swims to the surface to take the floating pellets.

 

[JMatthew]

The possibility had occured to me. There are only a couple of fish in the tank along with him - a dwarf Gourami, an Africian Leaf Fish and a eel that is MAYBE 4 inches so I don't toss in a ton of food. I bought the tank with the fish off of someone from Craigslist - he'd had an Elephant Nose in it also which had escpaded and he said he'd been depressed about it an hadn't cleaned the tank in month. The work is took to clean backed up this story. I also got every he had with it and there was a lot of chemicals for controlling alage. I figured this meant he'd been fighting with it for sometime and so took to feed them what I was sure they would eat. I also toss in about 3 to 4 alage wafers in a day. I suppose I've got the tank back into perhaps TOO good of shape - lol. Is he okay eating like this or what do you reccommend I do to make sure he eats enough? More wafers a day? I could toss in some flakes as they will DEFINATELY fall to the bottom since NO ONE in the tank eats them.

 

[skippy_49nz]

I would have thought that would be sufficient and I would probably only add a few vegetbles every so often to top up the diet.

 

[morgan]

My Common used to do this and he wasn't hungry! He just did it because he wanted to. He doesn't do it now he is older and much more lazy. I agree also, very nice looking Common.

 

[Haych]

oh he is gorgeous

i had a clown plec ( i called krusty ) and he LOVED the pellet food, he would go to the top, eat what he had, then go back for more

i think its just their character