Have your nitrates spiked since you added your plecos?

[asm129]

I want to buy a few fancy plecos for my 210G and 240G community tanks. I'd like to get a golden nugget and blue phantom.
The only thing is that I worry that having a pleco will make my nitrates jump by a lot. I had a 4" snowball pleco before and it seemed like he pooped more than my big aro. I work 60 hours a week so I only have time to do one water change per week. Have you noticed a big difference in your nitrates since you added your plecos?

 

[in2cichlids]

Not at all and I have a lot of plecos. That is all I do on my tanks is weekly water changes. As far as poop they do that quite a bit but not enough to harm anything. As long as your tank is well established you should be good to go

 

[jason longboard]

hey, why do they crap so much? All the fiber? I mean why seriously lol?

 

[yayfish24]

Plecos only have 2 hobbies. Pooping and eating.

 

[skjl47]

hey, why do they crap so much? All the fiber? I mean why seriously lol?

Hello; My thinking is that they are like other herbavores in that the digestion of plant matter is incomplete. Up to around 50% of the food energy passes thru the digestive syatems of some like horses or cows. Many creatures use the partially digested manure for food. In places where the trees are gone, humans dry the stuff and burn it to cook with.
I had a large common pleco in a bare bottom tank that was fed plant material . Lots of stringy waste. I added several rams horn snails to the tank. The snails ate the food material out of the pleco waste. The result was a considerably smaller volume of snail waste, which was much easier to siphon, and a big increase in the growth of the hornwort. I also had plenty of snails to feed to my other fish. While I guess it could be said that the snails ate the waste, I feeel it is more correct to say that they ate the remaining food material from the waste. A distinction with out a difference perhaps?