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After a 3 week quarantine, I placed 2 plain, brown Bristlenoses from a LFS in my planted 240 gal. Discus tank for some cleanup duties. They have been in the tank for about 2 weeks. Now, my 2 huge prized Amazon Sword plants, 24 inches plus, have many leaves that seem to have been stripped down to the veins in places. I'm no pleco expert, so I thought I would seek out to find people who were, does this sound like the bristlenoses may be rasping on the leaves? If so, is this a sign they may be hungry, or just normal behavior? Any tips on catching the little buggers in a big, heavily planted tank?

Was there a lot of algae in the tank when you put them in? They may not have enough food. My BNs clean my plants thoroughly but never damage a single one, including my swords.

What do you feed them?

I have no problem with swords being eaten in my tank either, but I do add food for my birstlenoses.

See the article on Feeding Plecos that is on the right side of this post [where it says "Articles(1)"]

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Mats

Bristlenose rasp for algae. They do this on amazon sword leaves which, unfortunately, are faily delicate. In the process they tend to rasp thrpugh the leaves. Swords which have a thicker, more "solid" leaf wont be damaged. They also will do this on compactas which are basically a dwarf amazon.

Ufortunately, I have found no way to stop them from doing this.

I also have amazon swords in my tank, and the BNs can strip some of the leaves, but usually this only occurs to the oldest outermost leaves. I find that they either leave alone, or the newer leaves are not affected at all. Unless they're eating the whole thing, I wouldn't worry about it too much. You can try to catch them by baiting with zucchini or something, and catch them when they're munching on that.

Thanks guys. When I put them in there I had the beginnings of a algae outbreak. Luckily, I was able to get a handle on it rather quickly. Still a little here and there, but nothing abnormal for a planted tank. I've been adding some Hikari wafers that I had lying around, but they don't seem to care for them much. I will go shopping for some veggies, and see if that does the trick. They really are cool little fish, just hope I don't have to end up moving them to another tank. Trying to catch anything in that tank is a real chore.

mine loves mango and zuchinni and squash.