Cranial Dump

I bought two cute little algae eaters this weekend at PetSmart. They will not grow bigger than 1.5″, which is very small for this type of fish, but I purposes chose these little guys from among the several algae eaters available. I made the 45 mile round trip to a pet store that consistently sells me healthy fish: PetSmart in Delavan, WI. It is worth the drive for me to get healthy fish, and, there’s a Panera Bread on the same block. I eat at Panera just about any chance I get (Asian Sesame Chicken Salad is soooooo yummy).

Back to the new little algae eaters: they are of the genus Otocinclus, and are commonly referred to as Otos, and are dwarf sucker mouth cat fish. They look like these Otos, and may be the same ones. These two little guys, which are currently 3/4″ long at most, have cleared at least 50% of the algae off of a large artificial log in the aquarium. They are eating the algae off of the artificial plants, too (tried real plants but don’t have enough light or an optimal set up for this). So, I’ll not be cleaning much algae, if any, after all.

These algae eaters are different from others I’ve owned. They seem to like to play and they chase each other around. They aren’t nipping at each other’s fins so I am assuming this is playful behavior. But then, their downturned sucker mouths don’t allow for fin-nipping, do they? >grin<

Tags: algae, algae eaters, aquarium

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Tagged as algae, algae eaters + Categorized as aquarium