good substitute for pleco?

[Phantompirate]

What is a good alge eating substitute for a pleco that can stand brackish water?

the tank ive got now (used to be a 55) a 120gal and has 5 monos 4 archers 3 needle fish and 3 leaf fish. the leaf fish i am unsure about and before i raise the salinity to high can these guys go brackish? (my brother works at petsmart and some guy gave us his needlefish and the leaf fish so thats why they are in there) if they cannot tolerate brackish conditions then i can easily move them to another tank.
heres a pic of the leaf fish

 

[santoury]

You should keep the leaf fish and needlenose gars in freshwater. I personally would not take the risk with such nice fish.

 

[kyleking007]

I ddint think plecos could handle brackish water. or is there a spacific kind?

 

[Phantompirate]

i didnt think plecos could ether thats why im asking if theres anything similar to a pleco thats brackish, cause snails and shrimps would just get eaten.. or would a big snail like an apple snail work?
and thanks for the reply on the leaf fish, and gars will do (previous post)

 

[santoury]

I do not think apple snails (and most other snails) can handle it.

Where are you located? If you live near an estuarine system maybe you could try one native snail and see how it works out. But usually it's best to just use your hands to clean

 

[Phantompirate]

no where near the coast..... Colorado..... lol so yeah im just gonna buy a scraper then. on another note what are some good catfishes or other scavengers?

 

[Daeorn]

What is your salinity at now?

I have kept three plecos at different times in my brackish tank.

Two green phantoms and a common, all around 4-5". They all were slowly acclimated and my tank is only at 1.004 that maybe goes to 1.006 at the highest.

They seem to do fine if acclimated properly, and I had them in there for months and they ate and were very active. Not something I'd normally suggest doing though.

Getting a few mollies could be a good bet though. They only seem to eat algae when they don't have other food sources though. But with other bigger fish that will hog most the food, they might go for it.

I also have 2 fiddler crabs and 3 red claw crabs. They do a somewhat ok job at clean up and you can sometimes see them picking algae off my plants. However soon as I switched to sand I haven't really had any algae blooms... hm

 

[Pufferpunk]

Forcing plecos (or any other FW fish) into BW for any length of time, will greatly shorten their lifespan. The best algae eaters I've found are mollies. You could try sailfins. They cleared my tank of a terrible hair algae problem.

 

[Daeorn]

Yeah exactly. I took them on from people who couldn't get them to a lfs, and I housed them until I could. Putting an animal anywhere it doesn't belong just because it looks pretty isn't good fish keeping.

 

[Danyal]

there are some BW plecos but i don't think they're in the hobby, if you can find nerite snails(i've got olive nerites) then you can take them all the way up to full marine and they still do great and they're some of the best algae eaters i've found.