Oto feeding

As most of you know, if you follow Tom's guidelines, your Otos can end up being fairly unhappy and starved -- there's not much algae to eat. I have 4 Otos in a 29G non-CO2 tank.

In the past, I've created algae-covered rocks in a glass jar (water with ferts) in the sun. The Otos really enjoy these rocks. Recently, however, I thought I saw one of those cyanobacteria types of algaes in my algae jar, and I was afraid to put the rocks in my tank. And, I was a little slow to start a new jar.

Well, my Otos said, "OK, if you are not going feed us algae rocks, we'll figure something else out."

I have 4 Panda Corys in my 29G tank. Each day, I drop in 2 very small pieces of HBH Veggie Wafers for some extra food for the Pandas. For those who have never had Pandas, they typically find these veggie wafer pieces in 5 to 10 secs and start sucking on them. They end up wasting more food than they take in, I'm sure -- they are rather messy. A few days ago, my Otos caught on and now feed with the Pandas. They'll suck on a wafer piece, if given the chance, but mostly they eat the scraps from the Panda feeding frenzy. The first time I saw 8 fish around a wafer, I thought, "Hey, I thought I only had 4 Pandas!" Looking closer I saw the Otos in the fray.

For those who have trouble keeping their Otos happy (fed), I thought this might be helpful.

I'm sure the algae is better for the Otos nutritionally, so I'm hoping they still get a little algae here and there. I'm going to stop the algae jar for now.