Oscars and Flagtails?
- Thread starter sherco
- Start date
I would go for a bristlenose pleco for the algae. The flagtail will do fine with your Oscars but they get super big and will add to bioload, more waste in water = more food for algae/diatoms. And the flagtail won't give you as good of a cleaning job as the pleco. Just avoid the large growing plecos, bristlenose are good because they eat algae for their whole life and don't get too big.
I have bristlenose plecos in several of my tanks, they don't eat algae. Also afraid my Oscars would kill one.
BN plecos do eat algae, one of the best algae eaters you can get usually. If you feed yours algae wafers or other food regularly, you have probably trained yours into thinking they don't need to bother with the algae, as they will be fed wafers. In tanks where I grow a decent supply of algae, I don't feed my bristlenoses anything else, except the occasional cucumber treat. That keeps them busy on the algae. The Oscar aggression might be an issue if yours are aggressive, each fish is different, though generally they are tolerant of tankmates.
The flagtail is do-able in your tank, I just don't think it will do as great of a job on the algae as you might hope.
The flagtail is do-able in your tank, I just don't think it will do as great of a job on the algae as you might hope.
I have also found that chaetostoma plecos do a great job with algea control. In my experience, the older the BN plecos get, the less algea they graze on.
I find plecos to be great algae eaters as well. They just don't eat BBA or the green dot algae (but then again, most algae eaters don't). Though mine also gets a mouth full of leftover pellets occasionally, so they do like their protein.