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I recently acquired three Pimelodus pictus, and I quickly noticed their enthusiasm for food (vacuums come to mind). The bulging bellies are both comical and alarming.

their tankmates are one "common" pleco, two weather loaches, three platys, and one sun cat.

the platy eat their crisps long before they hit bottom, so for the rest of the tank I have an assortment of sinking wafers and the occational cube of defrosted bloodworms

My problem is how do I make sure there is enough food for the other inhabitants of the bottom of the tank without having my pictus explode? all the fish are still rather small(ish) compared to their maximum size, so I want to encourage growth, I just don't want the pictus to become unhealthy with their need to gorge on everything in sight.

This is a fairly difficult (and rather common) problem...

There are different possibilities for different fish. For a pleco, feeding chunks of fresh vegetable will work well - P. pictus will not eat those. JBL also makes a Novo Plec XL tablet/wafer food, where each tablet is about 16mm diameter, roughly the size of a US 5c piece. Should be big enough that a greedy pictus will not eat it in one gulp. I have had pictus take a whole Hikari algae wafer in the past.

It's more difficult with the loach and the other catfish. The horseface loach will probably take small particle foods, such as daphnia. If the sun cat is larger (in mouth-size) than the pictus, perhaps you can feed LARGER pieces of food...

The only other option is to split the fish up.

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Mats

I doubt the pictus will be unhealthy, bcs they're eating so well. Longterm its the other fish that may suffer if they can't compete.
A few months ago on a thread, I suggested keeping myleus (or other dollars) with P Pictus. They are also quite gluttonous and feeding time would be a frenzied affair, but they would all get their share.

Unfortunately splitting them up is not an option at this time, nor is a shift in tank mates.

The sun cat is actually a bit smaller that the pictus for now, and he competes fairly well. I guess the real question is will it harm the pictus to be gorging themselves daily, or should I wait on feeding the tank until the bulging stomachs has subsided (which boils down to every other day). All the wafers are big enough at the moment to prevent one gulp munching, it's usually three or four bottom feeder wafers and one larger algae wafer for the pleco.

The pictus feeding should be ok if you vary the size if the food offered, as indicated previously but also minute grains for the loaches

My real concern is that the sun cat will get big quite quickly & look at the other tankmates (except the pleco) as snack items...

I'm not sure the sun cat poses a threat to most of my fish ( I couldn't care less if he eats the platys)
He's about two inches at the moment, the pleco is 5" going on 15", the loaches are 4" going on 10", and the pictus are 2.5" and get around 5-7" right?(I know the cat-elog says 5" but I've talked to several people who claim theirs are bigger)

That should make them a bit bigger than snack size, even if he does get to 18"(and I have my doubts he will) since mouth size on a cat like that is about 3.5" or so from my experience for the channel cats of that size I've caught, and they have a similar build (the fish failed to remove my boyfriend's hand though he tried very hard)

by the way, everyone says they grow "Very Quickly", but how quick is that? should I expect him to double in size in a month? less? I've had him about three weeks, he was at the shop for six months, no discernible change but that could be stunting and stress right (he has no fins left from his tankmates at the shop).