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I've never really had any problems with my plecos eating my plants except a small (1.5") L128 I was having trouble feeding, even though all my tanks are planted. It was eating the lower leaves of my Bacopa carolinia. If you are doing a fairly heavily planted tank, plecos can't eat enough for you to notice. As others have said already, the most concern is with the bigger ones uprooting the plants. I had a Gibbiceps that refused to allow anything in the substrate in his favourite area in the center of the tank and destroyed every plant in the area, plus in thrashing around in other areas he'd thrash around and uproot all the plants, so I had to remove him from the tank, even though it's a 125 gallon with other fish which uproot plants. If you keep them reasonably well fed with veggies, they don't bother with the plants because they don't taste as good.

I have a fairly heavily planted tank and I keep two longfin Ancistrus cf. cirrhosus. They are quite colorful, one is a lovely golden yellow and the other is white. Both have red eyes. They do no real damage to my plants, and even delicately remove any algae from the leaves, except for one anubias that the male kept digging up. I moved the plant to a new position and now he cleans it but doesn't dig it out of the substrate any longer. I think it was in a spot that he felt was his special resting place or something. I do have a nice piece of Malaysian driftwood that my plecs like to chew at times. I feed algae wafers and fresh veggies and I assume that this keeps them so well fed that they really don't bother my plants at all. Hope this helps.

Lee A. wrote: Hope this helps.

Probably not seeing as the previous post was over 2 years ago.....

LOL...its never too late