PlanetCatfish.com

I need to move next month for a new job and am thinking that I should take advantage of the move to drill some caves into the large pieces of driftwood in my 125 gal. tank. My question is whether or not my plecos are likely to use caves that may be drilled at a angle? As I look at the wood in the tank it seems that I can put a few holes in places where they will slope upwards at a steep angle and still keep a clean visual look. I've got good looking driftwood and don't want to go crazy with a drill and ruin the way my tank looks, but I also don't want to drill holes that the fish won't feel comfortable in. As I look through other peoples tanks at this site the caves seem to almost always be horizontal, it doesn't seem as though this would be true in nature.

Plecos don't care, it's more about (with some plecos) the relationship between the mouth of the cave and the water current. Genera such as don't care at all.

Jools

I have lots of driftwood in most of my tanks, and if it isn't "cavey" enough I us a paddle bit,up to 2 inches in d iameter, depending on what L# I am housing there. I have had good breeding success with this approach, especially with bn,some of my hypans like them too.My 180 gallon show tank is chock full of driftwood and I house over 30 different types of plecos in there, all are fat and happy,plenty of places to hide and breed on occasion. I leave the water a bit tannis also, It seems the fish are more comfortable and its a bit more natural

I think if you have bog wood which is large and solid enough to bore a hole of suitable size for the species of plecos you want to breed that is a nice way to get the best of both worlds; decorative wood and breeding cave all in one.
I have some rectangular caves I made out of ceramic floor tiles with a faux stone finish angled at up to 30* and the fish breed in these. I think having the size of the cave sufficient is more important than what angle it is oriented but if the entrance is lower than the back end of the cave you will have more trouble with egg masses being ejected by accident.
I use plenty of caves which are lying horizontal also so I try to give the fish some choices between sizes, angles and materials. I recently bought over a dozen home made terra cotta caves which are about 1-1/2 X 3/4 inches in cross section. They are somewhat flattened. These just came in so I do not know how popular they will be. L134 have already taken over all the caves I placed in the tanks but those are probably males. I still need to add more wood to provide females with plenty of hiding places. Buying wood gets expensive and I can't always find something along the rivers which is usable but sometimes I do.
I am setting up a couple new colonies of 3 year old F1 Peckoltia compta(L134) in 40 gal breeders. I am using my new clay caves in the new set ups. I have about 16 breeding aged fish per tank. I have one more 40 breeder to set up for L134 since I have a large number of 3 year old fish(~70).
But I also like to include quite a bit of wood, mostly Malaysian bog wood among and over the caves regardless of the type of cave. Combining caves in the wood sounds like a good idea to me.