[AquaticLife] Lights and algae
What kind of “algae eaters” are they? There are hundreds, if not thousands of species of “algae eaters”.
Try taking a slice of zucchini and drop it in the tank overnight and see if they eat at it. They should. If not, remove it in the morning.
A lesson learned though… it’s not good to buy fish without doing a little research first. Most newer tanks cannot support a single algae eater, much less two but then there are some species like otocinclus that should be kept in shoals of five or more so they should go into a well established tank.
Another example, I recently bought a new little clown pleco (one of the dwarf species) and they are finicky about what they will eat and mostly only like algae so I had to make sure I had plenty growing in the tank I was planning him for so that he would have plenty of algae to eat prior to getting him. Once they are acclimated to a tank, you can then work on weaning them onto algae wafers, etc., but if they are wild caught fish, they may take a while to get acclimated to commercial foods. He’s in a 65G tank and I’m sure he’ll have it cleaned up in the next week or so and then I’ll have to work on getting him acclimated to algae wafers, veggies, etc.
Keep trying the algae wafers and zucchini slices also but don’t drop it into the tank until after lights out and only drop a small piece if the fish are small. I feed pieces of algae wafers to my cherry shrimp to supplement their diet and I break the algae wafer up and the piece I drop into their tank is about the size of a pencil point and that feeds close to a hundred cherry shrimp for an hour or so. The good thing about the zucchini slices is at least they won’t disintegrate over night so you won’t have that issue..
Do you have any decorations, etc., in another tank with algae on it that you could put in their tank? Do you know anyone with healthy fish tanks where you could borrow one of their algae covered items?
Lenny Vasbinder Fish Blog - http://GoldLenny.blogspot.com
Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society
