On (30 Aug 96) Dave Phillips Rambled On  To All...
 DP>      My pleco just died with no apparent explanation, and I'm
 DP> wondering if there's cause for concern.  Is it normal for fish to just
 DP> drop off sometimes, without the incident being a signal that there's
 DP> something out of equilibrium in the tank?  All my other fish seem
 DP> happy and healthy.
  How long did you have it? How were you feeding it?
 Plecos  scrape glass for algae for food, but unless you leave say a
 pellet/tablet  after lights out,  they can starve to death, stores may
 not properly feed plecos either, so if its been starving and you  don't
 feed it right, you find a dead pleco.
 I had one pleco I bought small, which in a 60 gal lived 5+  years and
 was about 8 Inchs long.
 Fed it pellets and tablets dropping  where it could find them, and
 after feeding the other fish, so they would pretty much leave the
 pellet/tablet alone.
 DP>      I'm going to wait a bit and make sure everybody's ok before
 DP> getting another pleco, but I expect I'll need somebody to eat my
 DP> algae.  He'd been doing an exceptionally good job of keeping things
 DP> clean, and I was very pleased with Mr. Pleco.  :>  Maybe he ran out of
 DP> algae to eat, or ate too much (got him about 3 weeks ago and set him
 DP> loose on 3-4 months' worth of algae) ??
  Uh oh,  you do not buy a pleco and expect it to live off algae, it
  will eat it, but you STILL need to feed it and in a way it can find
  and eat w/o other fish getting most of the food.
  Also not all algae is eaten, and some types are bad for it,
  but If you were not feeding it, expecting it to get its food from
  small leftovers and algae, looks like you may have starved it.
... Deaf exp # 3: Watching the hearing person making wierd & crazy gestures
___ Messenger V1.2 [Unreg]
--- PPoint 2.00
---------------