PlanetCatfish.com

I was wondering if anyone had had any success with keeping a suckermouth catfish with Lake Malawi cichlids. My pH is 8.0, and the GH is about 15º.

Gary,
This question gets asked frequently and the answer is a big no. You can either have happy plecos in soft, neutral to acidic water or happy Rift Lake cichlids in hard, alkaline water.
-Shane

A fish who is build to live in acidic water can't live in alkaline water, the main reason why the fish doesn't like it is that it's skin not build for alkaline water.. it will get (maybe non-visible) skin problems.

Thank you for your replies. I had read somewhere that Ancistrus tamboensis was somewhat flexible regarding water chemistry, and I was looking for verification. I'll keep searching for a way to rid myself of this brown sludge on the glass and rocks.

Quite often the brown stuff is actually some type of bacteria and not algae. Cynobacteria or something, forget the name. Don't know that the plec's would eat it anyway, most of mine ignore it.

As far as plecos for hard water, I live in Indiana which sits on a big slab of limestone so you can guess that our water is very hard. ph 7.8-8.0 Many of the plecos do fine in our water without having to lower it to south american parameters. The most common ones for the africans are the common pleco as well as the albino ancisturs. Most ancistrus and gibbiceps species do well in our water but cannot comment on which ones are compatible with Africans. Many Peckoltia and Panaques do well as well but many of them do not eat algae very effectivley. Baryancistrus do very poorly in our water.

GaryK wrote:I'll keep searching for a way to rid myself of this brown sludge on the glass and rocks.

Which Malawis have you got? I find that many Mbuna will do a better job on unwanted biocover than any Catfish ever could, particularly fish like Petrotilapia or Labeotropheus (esp. if you leave them hungry for a couple of days ever once in a while). They are much less fussy about what they will graze on.