# Whats eating my plants?



## johnmoss (Jul 24, 2007)

Hi all,

something seems to be eating (some of) my plants. The only plants being eaten of the list below are the swords and the Val. When you look at the plants they appear to be skeletons....ie whatever is eating them seems to be eating only the soft parts.

I have a tank with:
Amazon Swords
Jungle Val
Dwarf Hairgrass
Java Fern
Red Crypto
Bacopa

Currently the tank is stocked with:

Flying Fox (3)
Siamese Algea Eaters (5)
Golden Nugget Pleco (1)
Clown Pleco (2)

There is also a small snail population that based on my research of pictures and talks with the people at my LFS appear to be non plan eaters.

Any idea who or what the culprit is?


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## StripesAndFins (Dec 31, 2008)

I have heard that some plecos will eat plants instead of algae but i am not entirely sure which species it is. i will have to do more research on it but i think it is one the three plecos.


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## Sea-Agg2009 (Aug 2, 2008)

I'm not sure on the clown pleco, a number would help. A GN pleco will eat plants if algea is not around. Try adding an algea wafers into the feeding. When I had pleco's I would add 1 per pleco. Mine went nuts over them. They would grab them and much on them until they were completely gone.


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## shev (Jan 18, 2005)

Pleco lips are very raspy, good for scrubbing algae off of rocks and stuff, but it also tends to tear up your plants.


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## ewolfe315 (Jan 3, 2009)

Id have to say the Pleco. I have 1 that just shreads all the leaves off from bottom to top of the plants. As for my clown loaches,they were notorius for just uprooting plants in there time of play time. 

Now I also have this huge Pleco,10 inches long at last measurement, and he just kept uprooting everything that was planted. It's this smaller Pleco thats eating the leaves.


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## micstarz (Oct 22, 2005)

I had an intuition that it was a pleco before I even clicked the link to this thread...


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## COM (Mar 15, 2008)

I would bet that the cause is the plecos either eating the plants or ripping them while eating algae off of them.


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