Food/diet/brand recommendations?

[Xaos]

Hi everyone, it's been awhile! I searched the forum but wasn't able to find any broad or specific advice on foods, so I'm looking to share my feeding regimen and also to look for suggestions on what to add, especially for my more carnivorous plecos! 

I have two breeding projects going, with snow white ancistrus and green dragons!

  

Being mostly herbivores, I think they're generally happy with lots of spare vegetable matter (canned green beans, fresh lettuce, zucchini, cucumber, etc.), but we also rotate through Hikari Mini Algae Wafers, Repashy Morning Wood, Repashy Soilent Green, Sera Catfish Chips, and more occasionally Fluval Bug Bites. They of course have plenty of mopani and driftwood around.

My L239 Blue "Panaque", Brutus, is the less complicated of my more meat-eating plecos. He's a big fan of the Fluval Bug Bite sticks, and he occasionally gets Repashy Bottom Scratcher and Repashy Soilent Green. He will also occasionally nibble on the Sera Catfish Chips, but the Bug Bites are the only thing he really goes crazy for.

 

Last but not least, we have my L091 Three Beacon, Diego! He has somewhat confounded me. He's somewhat shy, having taken up residence in a hollow log in my 55-gallon community tank, and is not easy to observe. The most we see of him during the day is his third beacon waving around outside the opening to the log. I can sometimes observe him eating if I put food directly outside of his log at night, when the room is dark, and then sit motionless outside of the tank for several minutes. Sometimes if I walk past the tank in the middle of the night, I will catch a glimpse of him, but he's very quick to notice anyone around outside of the tank. So it's hard to tell what he likes. 

 

My concern is that he hasn't grown terribly much since we got him about 5 months ago. I've been reading that they get to 9"-11", and he's grown to maybe 4"-5" from about half that size. I can't find much on their growth rate, but I would expect him to be a bit bigger by now, so I'm concerned he isn't eating well enough. In any case, he's offered pretty much all of the above - canned green beans and fresh veggies, all three types of Repashy (Bottom Scratcher, Morning Wood, Soilent Green), algae wafers, catfish chips, and bug bites. He's mostly interested in the higher-protein foods, as to be expected.

We've recently gotten more consistent access to local frozen foods, so I'm looking to expand to include bloodworms for him and Brutus but I'm also open to other options. Freeze-dried are the only local shelf-stable options for higher protein products I've seen, and as they don't sink they're not a great option for my bottom feeders, but I'm willing to order online if there are better options. I've heard mixed things about hikari/primarily fish meal products, but I've also seen them highly recommended, so I'm curious to see if anyone else is more informed on that.

[Lennie]

I like some Hikari foods but algae wafers isnt one of them. You may check Tropical Hi Algae. It has lots of different algaes and more than %50 of the ingredients! My ancistrus like it

On 9/3/2023 at 9:36 PM, Xaos said:

carnivorous plecos

I thought my L199 was more carnivorous too. And then I talked to my friend who studies Loricariidaes as her phd, and she said they mostly eat algae and detritus in the wild and she said scientific literature never suggested carnivores. However, on planetcatfish, they were mentioned as "Hypancistrus are more carnivores than algae eaters. This is backed up by a small and lightly toothed mouth that indicates they are poor algae scrapers. Provide small and frequent supply of mainly meaty foods such as dry discus food, bloodworm and even brineshrimp with the infrequent offering of flake or algae tablets."

 

[nabokovfan87]

On 9/3/2023 at 11:36 AM, Xaos said:

Looks pretty good!

Aqueon has the newer nutrinsect line of foods.  Similar to bug bites, but no fish in the recipe (fish meal or fish oil) and it's got slightly more bugs in the mix.  It's cheap, might be worth a try!

In terms of plecos, I think the repashy is the way to go.  You can supplement the foods with something like krill flake, freeze dried foods, or something else and just mix it into the repashy gel.  That's been my favorite out of the foods to feed them.

Second to that, you have all the big brands with their own algae wafers.  Northfin wafers I was not a fan of.  Xtreme wafers mine wouldn't touch (others have had great success with them!),  hikari mine loved, and then the older sera ones I enjoyed a lot as well.  I haven't tried the sera ones you have, but I would imagine it's very similar and works well for the plecos.  Something like carnivore pellets would work too. They can get their mouths onto the larger size pellets and then treat it like any other form of algae pellet.