New Pick-up, Northern Hog Sucker

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
WahooWillie;4822475; said:
Mine will eat sinking wafers or pellets occasionally, but tend to prefer frozen foods like bloodworms. Even at a small size they can re-arrange a tank in a matter of hours. Very cool to watch them feed in aquaria. They will bury that snout and roots around in the sand and gravel and push objects out of the way.
You can see my 5'' NHS in my tank here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZOIiI6Bg60
This is days after I set them up in the tank with just creek sand and rocks. The tank has changed a ton, but you can see them sucking down bloodworms at feeding time.
Suckers require a ton of food to stay healthy. Remember that they will be very hard to feed if there are fast, aggressive feeders around. Suckers will feed very slowly (I call them leisure-feeders), suck down food, then chew for a while. Just a thought.
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Very cool, thanks for the info. Yea I'm going to have to put the food in front of him, because I have minnows in the tank and they don't let food hit the ground. They won't touch algea wafers though.
 
AOmonsta;4822595;4822595 said:
Very cool, thanks for the info. Yea I'm going to have to put the food in front of him, because I have minnows in the tank and they don't let food hit the ground. They won't touch algea wafers though.
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Northern Hogsuckers are pretty cool looking, I love their markings (especially in the wild... we have some big ones in small creeks here). N. Hogsuckers get pretty big they max out at 18-24 inches and need some type of small invertabrates in their diet (in the wild they mainly eat immature aquatic insects), like Bloodworms , scuds, Blackworms, mosquito larvae, small ghost shrimp etc.
 
Do these eat the algae in your tank? I have a native setup and thought about catching one of these to put in it to eat the brown algae in my tank.
 
bjbass;4850048; said:
Do these eat the algae in your tank? I have a native setup and thought about catching one of these to put in it to eat the brown algae in my tank.
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Not that I've noticed yet. I thought they may act like plecos, but they don't stay stuck to things, but use their mouths like a vacuum in the substrate. He's now becoming pretty active in the tank.
 
AOmonsta;4850157;4850157 said:
Not that I've noticed yet. I thought they may act like plecos, but they don't stay stuck to things, but use their mouths like a vacuum in the substrate. He's now becoming pretty active in the tank.
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Most N.A, suckers eat primarily invertabrates, (nymphs, water insects, scuds, shrimp, crawdads etc) and will need that in their diet if you cant get him to eat pellets.
 
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