Red Teeth/Lip

[Tenzin]

Hi Everyone,

I am just concerned about the health of one of my larger royal pleco, His about 7inches at the moment housed in a 5x2x2 with sump filtration and a fx5.

He appears to be eating like normal and no unusual coloration (no signs of stress). The only concern i have is last night i saw him sucking on the glass and went to inspect him. He appears to have reddish underlip around the top of his lip.

Should i be concerned? I am at work so there is no way I can get any pictures.

Has anyone else encountered this with their panaques? or plecos?

If so what were the measures you took and should I be worried.

[hotsauce48]

If you have a acrylic tank I would be concerned,Their teeth can easily damage/scratch the inside of the aquarium.This broken material can puncture it's lip and /or skin.

( which is why I don't have one )

[MatsP]

If you have a acrylic tank I would be concerned,Their teeth can easily damage/scratch the inside of the aquarium.This broken material can puncture it's lip and /or skin.

( which is why I don't have one )

Sorry to wake an old thread, but do you actually have any documented evidence (not one post on some forum!) that acrylic tanks and rasped off fragments have ever caused damage to a

Panaque

- particularly one that is commonly known to rasp on lumps of hardwood?

Yes, they may scratch the surface on an acrylic tank - and if the fish lives in such a tank for a long period of time, it will look like someone has rubbed the inside of the tank with very fine sand-paper, because they have teeth that are intended to scrape wood, and small scratches will occur in any "soft" material. But I expect that the scraped off fragments are small enough to not do any harm to a fish that is used to eating bits of wood. I have no EVIDENCE of this, but with the number of acrylic tanks and number of Panaque species available, I'd say someone has at some point kept a Panaque.

In my search for an answer to my above question, I found this interesting article: http://pages.towson.edu/nelson/Panaque/manaus.html
Unfortunately, it only says that they used an acrylic aquarium in studies of wood-eating fish, and does not say anything about the (longer term) health-consequences of such a tank.

--
Mats

[grokefish]

I kept a panaque for years in an acrylic tank.
Yes it did scratch it, tiny little circles all over the tank, took ages to polish out.
No my fish never suffered any ill effects.

Matt