Uh oh! My 10 gallon tank is getting lots of algae and I don’t know why! Maybe the nice gentleman (or woman… It’s 2018 we’re progressive at Reef Playground) at Petco can give me a solution! What’s that? There’s a small fish that cleans the tank for me? It’s called a pleco? PERFECT, I’ll take two!

WRONG!!! FAKE NEWS!!! I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but plecos are probably the worst fish to this problem. For some reason there’s a myth going around that plecos eat everything we don’t like in an aquarium and just make it vanish like thin air. I’d say on the scale of dirty fish from neon tetras to koi, I would put plecos one step above african cichlids. They’re like toddlers…. Yuck.

 

    

 

And don’t think the little guy is gonna stay little. There are hundreds of species of plecos, and almost every species gets larger than 6 inches. Even better though, the ones sold in basic pet stores like pPetco or Petsmart labeled Common plecos actually can grow from 1 to 2 feet!!! A full size pleco needs a 100 gallon tank, AT LEAST! Here’s the deal, SOME species of plecos do eat SOME species of algae. But only when the pleco is small. Algae has such a low nutritional value that after a while the pleco requires more sustainable substances. Now it’s true plecos are kinda like the garbage disposals of freshwater aquariums. They will eat all the leftover food scraps that hit the floor after cool guys are done with them. But when a pleco gets big enough and food is scarse enough plecos can and will turn carnivorous. There are better fish who might algae. Like true siamensis, japonica shrimp, ottocinclus, and a plethora of snails. That being said, nothing is 100%. Some of those can also be lazy ass bums