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I have 6 plecos in a 75 gallon with gorgeous 2 ft. tall Amazon swords. 3 bristle-noses, 1 cactus leopard, a new snowball, and a new gold nugget.

All my 5 tanks have a bristlenose with plants, and my leopard has been around plants without problems. However, I recently got the snowball and the gold nugget within a week's time, and I suspect one of them is rasping my swords' leaves. Although I've read that the gold nugget won't harm plants, I can't be sure. I want to move the suspect to another tank, but as you all know catching them in a planted tank is not the most fun thing to do, so I'm hoping someone with experience can help me discern which is the most likely suspect.

Thank you.

Hello,

You didn't mention if the snowball was L102 or LDA33. The latter will definitely chew on softer plants like your swords. Gold nuggets hang on plants, but I've never seen them do any damage.

Larry Vires

Thanks for the reply, Larry, but I'm really not sure what species it is. Compared to the pictures on the PlanetCatfish site, my snowball's pattern more closely matches the Big White Spot LDA33, in that the Big White Spot appears to have rounder spots, whereas the L102's spots are more irregular. Also, the L102's spots seem more spread out than the LDA33, although I'm not sure if it's just an individual thing, as far as these two characterisitcs are concerned. I'm not sure what other differences there are, but I'm in Northern California, and I would think that "readily available" might be an issue here. Not that this fish wasn't expensive or is in all LFSes around here, to the contrary, it cost me $40 for all 3" (SL) , and I hadn't seen the species anywhwere else, except where I got it.

Are you saying the LD102 does NOT eat plants? And, when you say "softer" is that a figure of speech? I ask because my Swords' leaves seem to be quite sturdy compared to wisterias, and such.

Thanks again for your help!

OK, it looks like I have an LDA33, almost certainly. I have moved him into another plant, which has smaller plants, just to be sure iot's him. Firs thing he did was lock mouths, literally with a female ancistrus. They went at it for awhile, but now it appears that the snowball has established him/herself. Interestingly, in this particular species of b-nose, of which I have two females and one male, the female seems to be much more dominant than the male, while in the the other species of ancistrus I have, the male is.

Anyway I have an LDA33(oops like I already said), and am hoping that now my big swords will be left alone. Another point to mention is that I never saw this guy eat the whole 3 weeks he was in the tank. Other fish and plecos at least ate pelllets, wafers, worms, etc., but not this guy. So, maybe you're right, he went after algae late at night and ate some leaves with it, too.

Any ideas or recommendations would also be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kelvin

Hi,
The gold nugget may also be eating your echinodorus,but it depends on the individual.Mine for example distroied my echinodorus in about tree weeks.

Btw:I would love to see a picture of your 2feet echinodorus