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Is there much aggresion between them? I have one L90 who is about 20cm (excluding tail filaments) and he is becoming quite aggressive to similar sized L190 and stands his ground against a 31cm L190.

There are some great pics in the link, great find on the wood. Did you find it or buy it?

hi matt,
until now i must say they behave quite friendly to eachother...this might change...but more or less each has it's area where they spend the daytime...during the feeding when two cross eachother ..they show elbows...but still not a agressive attack ...
i bought the wood from differend places...but all private!! in the shop this would have cost me a fortune!! the massive one was around 117 pounds...all others less of course...

i still have a bit of a question mark what else i should feed them ...exept of 9 different tabs, shrimps, vegetables, and my self made vegi-fish-shrimp mix...

regards from zurich
farid

That was a great buy on the wood, I wish I could find pieces like that.

I dont think you could feed much more tbh. You could try to culture algae/biofilm onto some pebbles or pieces of wood which would simulate a more natural way of feeding.

Forgive me if you've already said it but are you going to try and stimulate breeding using any sort of method or just wait and see?

Hi Farid,

By now I'm sure you know that I have found earth worm and Spirulina Sticks very useful foods for both the adults and fry of evey pleco species and Loricariidae species I have kept and bred. I know there is a distributor in the UK although I don't recall that company's name. These foods greatly simplify things for me. I would hazard a guess that between these sticks and your home made mix that would probably prove to be sufficient and could simply your own dietary regimes. The earth work sticks in particular were developed as a conditioning food for Channel Catfish breeders. I think that is one of the reasons they have worked so well for other catfish like those we aquarists keep and breed. The fry I feed earth worm sticks and Spirulina have excellent growth rates. I do not rely exclusively on them but they are the staple diet for my catfish. Even all my wild Discus eat the sticks. I also use frozen blood worms and live black worms. To feed live black worms I place them in a bowl so they don't all escape into the substrate but some always do and become established in it. They don't do any harm and may actually be helpful as additions that contribute to making a more complex ecosystem.

matthewfaulkner wrote:are you going to try and stimulate breeding using any sort of method or just wait and see?

hi matt,
i will watch and check for at least one year... tomorrow i get the three caves (burned and ready) but i will first feed them well and make sure they're not as shy as they are now ....after a while...

i have not yet a method...
adjustments will be
changing the stream pump...during softwater changes and temp. drop
maybe adding salt to get the osmotic pressure even more effectiv during waterchanges...and so on...one day i will add the caves and check again how they behave...i will also simulate a hard core High condictivity season like 2 months or so to let the water get old... before temp. changes and followed by soft water ...etc etc...as i did with the 204 just do some changes...from time to time...not tooo many parameters at once...maybe 1 or two at the time...(otherwise i dont even know what the effect was)

i make my changes during months...and maybe after 3-4 months i give it another change (by anything) after 3-4 months another one...while enjoing to watch them.

so there will not be a "just wait and look"

@ Larry,
thanks for your input...i still dont get it ..are the earthworm sticks really made out of normal (the oone we use for fishing) worms or what?

farid

Farid asked:

"@ Larry,
thanks for your input...i still dont get it ..are the earthworm sticks really made out of normal (the oone we use for fishing) worms or what?"

Farid,
They apparently use Lumbriculus terrestris and not the red wigglers, Eosina foetida, manure worms.
Most fish do not like to eat the manure worms despite the fact they are sold as bait but all fish like the larger Night Crawler, as we call them in the USA. Not a lot of information is available about the ingredients in the earth worm sticks but their nearly universal appeal to all the fish I keep from wild Discus to the various plecos, followed by the successful spawning has made them an indispensable fish food for me. Larger fish eat them whole while other fish, Discus for example, and Pleco fry or Sturisoma fry like to eat the sticks after they soften in water. The Spirulina sticks from the same source seem to sufficiently balance the diet of more herbivorous fish. These two foods have become the staple diet of all my fish for about 5 years when I first bought them. Good results were soon obvious and so these two foods soon became my staples for all my fish.
I still feed frozen blood worms, live black worms and Tetra Color bits, the latter is something my Discus especially like.
One fish which really confirmed the value of these two stick foods for me were my wild Heckel Discus which eat more vegetable matter than the other two species. I raised 10 Heckels from 3 inches diameter juveniles to fully adult fish and kept them for 4 years but I sold them this spring to free up their tank. I love Heckel Discus but I do not have the luxury of keeping species that are nearly impossible to breed.

It has been so convenient for me to be able to rely so heavily on just these two stick foods as the staple diet for all my fish. i merely feed some fish more Spirulina than earth worm sticks if the fish are primarily herbivorous. For example, I have about 15-16 Parotocinclus cf epplyei or Parotocinclus Peru sp 1, I am not sure which I have but after they ate every speck of algae from the glass of a tank I allowed to become covered with algae in just a few days, the only food they truly went after with enthusiasm have been the Spirulina sticks. Both of these foods were designed as breeder conditioning foods for commercial aquaculture of Channel catfish and Tilapia and I believe that these commercial operations would not use such expensive foods unless they helped those businesses to meet high productivity and a low bottom line expense. These sticks are very expensive as commercial aquaculture foods go but compared to name brand prepared aquarium fish foods, they are relatively cheap.
I raised 8 Panaque L204 on these foods but I sold them instead of continuing to try to breed them. They were a species a little too large and messy for me and I could not foresee them paying off in the long run. I too, am conscious of my bottom line.
Except for my Discus, I am choosing to work with pleco species no larger than L333. I have long been a wild Discus enthusiast and have only raised domestics for money because they otherwise bore me to death. But wild Discus have always been special to me. My first 4 pairs of spawning Discus were all wild fish and my interest in wild Discus has never diminished. I don't mind the fact that they are more difficult to breed than domestics at all and it is one of the things that keeps me interested. Wild Discus still have their behavioral instincts intact and I find their behavior to be more complex than the domestics.

thanks Larry for you input!

i know that of course worm sticks or any other meaty food like discus granulate, sterlet sticks etc should not be the main food source for plecos. but in a mixture with nori-algae leaves, spirulina powder, spinach leaves cucumbers etc it makes a great food mix ...well grinded even exellent for fry


here i got some new pics

L75


L90


wood and grinded leaves all been eaten by the L90!! 6cm high


total view


farid

Larry- What brand of spirulina sticks do you use?

Farid,
What a showpiece!
Amanda

Linus_Cello wrote:Larry- What brand of spirulina sticks do you use?

Hi,
I buy my fish food from www.aquaticeco.com, Apoka, Florida.
Here is the link to their stick foods and prices.
http://www.aquaticeco.com/subcategories ... ks/F125A/0

I also buy their earth worm flakes.
http://www.aquaticeco.com/search/0/F01E

Good info Larry im still waiting to purchase mine for the L183's.

apistomaster wrote:Farid asked:

"@ Larry,
thanks for your input...i still dont get it ..are the earthworm sticks really made out of normal (the oone we use for fishing) worms or what?"

Farid,
They apparently use Lumbriculus terrestris and not the red wigglers, Eosina foetida, manure worms.
Most fish do not like to eat the manure worms despite the fact they are sold as bait but all fish like the larger Night Crawler, as we call them in the USA. Not a lot of information is available about the ingredients in the earth worm sticks but their nearly universal appeal to all the fish I keep from wild Discus to the various plecos, followed by the successful spawning has made them an indispensable fish food for me. Larger fish eat them whole while other fish, Discus for example, and pl*co fry or Sturisoma fry like to eat the sticks after they soften in water. The Spirulina sticks from the same source seem to sufficiently balance the diet of more herbivorous fish. These two foods have become the staple diet of all my fish for about 5 years when I first bought them. Good results were soon obvious and so these two foods soon became my staples for all my fish.
I still feed frozen blood worms, live black worms and Tetra Color bits, the latter is something my Discus especially like.
One fish which really confirmed the value of these two stick foods for me were my wild Heckel Discus which eat more vegetable matter than the other two species. I raised 10 Heckels from 3 inches diameter juveniles to fully adult fish and kept them for 4 years but I sold them this spring to free up their tank. I love Heckel Discus but I do not have the luxury of keeping species that are nearly impossible to breed.

It has been so convenient for me to be able to rely so heavily on just these two stick foods as the staple diet for all my fish. i merely feed some fish more Spirulina than earth worm sticks if the fish are primarily herbivorous. For example, I have about 15-16 Parotocinclus cf epplyei or Parotocinclus Peru sp 1, I am not sure which I have but after they ate every speck of algae from the glass of a tank I allowed to become covered with algae in just a few days, the only food they truly went after with enthusiasm have been the Spirulina sticks. Both of these foods were designed as breeder conditioning foods for commercial aquaculture of Channel catfish and Tilapia and I believe that these commercial operations would not use such expensive foods unless they helped those businesses to meet high productivity and a low bottom line expense. These sticks are very expensive as commercial aquaculture foods go but compared to name brand prepared aquarium fish foods, they are relatively cheap.
I raised 8 Panaque L204 on these foods but I sold them instead of continuing to try to breed them. They were a species a little too large and messy for me and I could not foresee them paying off in the long run. I too, am conscious of my bottom line.
Except for my Discus, I am choosing to work with pl*co species no larger than L333. I have long been a wild Discus enthusiast and have only raised domestics for money because they otherwise bore me to death. But wild Discus have always been special to me. My first 4 pairs of spawning Discus were all wild fish and my interest in wild Discus has never diminished. I don't mind the fact that they are more difficult to breed than domestics at all and it is one of the things that keeps me interested. Wild Discus still have their behavioral instincts intact and I find their behavior to be more complex than the domestics.

Larrys info is, and has always been precious He is my number one advisor on this forum. I have probably saved 100s of dollars in fish fry by using earth worm sticks (among other foods). His advice about filtration systems has also led me in the right direction in a significant way.

Farid.. I love your L90s and your apartment. I am amazed that you have not ruined your floor yet with water spills. I spill large quantities almost daily (I dont have wooden floors)

About your bedroom... The last few months I have kept only wood-eaters in my bedroom. The sound of them chewing wood during the night is so relaxing. Please keep this in mind when deciding which room to place your wood eaters.

What kind of program do u use to draw these? I need to make something similar for my next project.

I like this filter design.
I would probably use a power head instead of an air lift but that would depend a lot on what kind of fish I was keeping in it.
I use 2 sponge filters in my tank with one running via air lift and the other uses a power head.
The problem with pedestal type sponge filters is how soon the sponge becomes clogged with fines and then the suction collapses the sponge.
The above design can be varied to allow as much surface area as you want and more would be good if using a power head.

I am getting an L90 this week, so this thread has been great info. I have some questions, so maybe I'll start a new thread on this.

The idea as drawn above is what I use in all my innerfilters - I think half of my tanks

However, I use multiple layers of foam - typically 5 - and never an air-lift, but a motorized pump (pumping 300 to 800 liters an hour in most of them, but in 1 large tank (290 * 80 cm footprint) it is 3500 l/hr)

current over 150 l/hr for a 100 square cm (that is a 10 * 10 cm surface) should be avoided