Loaches Online Forum

get a Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate test kit... Those are the 3 main ones.

It would help diagnose the situation if you list what and how many fish you have and what size tank you have.. And how often do you change your water.

there are several species of otos, so to generalize to what they like is hard.

they are sensitive, so you must drip acclimate them into your tank but once they've settled, they're very hardy.

92?

85F is fine. Make sure to aerate the water because warm water doesn't retain oxygen as well.

extra oxygen would help actually. From what I remember reading, when the fish's gills have been expose to air for a long period of time, it dries up a bit. And when dried, the little filaments that collects oxygen clump together, thus making it harder for the gills to collect oxygen.

PH isn't as important as GH.

You can always cut PH & GH with a little RO or distilled water.

newshound wrote:o no not this again...
I go out on a limb and say it is a catfish

haha

Hey,
you left out the option of it being b. histrionica

Loaches definitely love the pipes.. Maybe put the pipes in the substrate or behind the woods... They like their privacy.

I thought it was fire eel too but the markings are a bit different.. Probably a sub species of M. E.

Snarlywolf wrote:hi, I'd say that that was a cummings barb, barbus cummingi.

mick would know


and that eel is quite common on the dinner table, in the mastacemblus genus definitely..

I can see them hunt insect larvae. There are a few here with hilly tanks.. Can you do an experiment for us and throw in live daphnia or brine shrimps?

Mine does forage for bloodworms... I'm going to go out on a limb and say, like most loaches, they're omnivorous.
So I'd imagine they'd eat, algae, vegetable matter, and insect larvae which are pretty common in a brook stream environment.

I don't know about hillies. Temperature wise, they seem compatible. But plecos are problematic... My sister has a regular pleco in with 2 goldfish.. And the pleco would injure the goldies once in a while.

He's innocent.. Look at that face.

you can use a solution of 1:20 bleach to clean your tank and all the equipments... It works pretty well and there's no danger... Just let everything dry completely and any bleach will be gone.

Call around DC... I'm sure a major city would have some dwarf loaches/sidthimunki.