As if baby mollies weren’t enough, this morning I found baby plecos in my aquarium!

 

There’s heckuva lot of baby-making going on in my tank!  I must be doing something right!

 

The baby plecos don’t need to be put into the baby mollies “nursery tank,” luckily. The baby plecos are big enough to stay out of the mouths of the other fish in the aquarium.

 

I may have inadvertently flushed these five baby plecos out of their nest yesterday when I went in search of my albino pleco, who I hadn’t seen in at least five days.

 

I wanted to see if he had died and ended up in one of the hollow ornaments I have in the tank (the castle, the ent, or the cave).

 

I turned over the castle first and spotted him alive and well in one of the castle spires. I tried to shake him out of the spire, but he was having none of it, so I gave up the quest…

…and then I spotted five baby plecos this morning sucking on one of the pieces of slate or shale rock that I have in the tank,  sandwiched between it and the glass of the aquarium, wiggling around and sucking algae like old pros. They’re only about half an inch long. One is an albino; the others are grey or darker.  I don’t know what species yet. Possibly bristle nose or rubber lip.

 

Three of the five plecos are in this image 

Very close to actual size, the way I resized this photo

 

So, curious, I did some research on pleco breeding and discovered that the female finds a hidden nook, lays her eggs and leaves, and then the male fertilizes them and then hangs around to protect the wee ones that result (up to 150 at a time!) until they’re big enough to fend for themselves and avoid getting eaten.

 

Apparently, what I did in shaking the castle to try to dislodge him is that I liberated at least five baby plecos, and they’re what I found on the rock this morning.  Which means he could still have another one hundred-plus pleco babies still up inside the castle!  If that’s the case, I’m going to be looking for pleco buyers in the not too distant future!  I hope my aquarium shop will agree to take them off my hands.

 

They’re small species plecos (not the big “common” pleco, which can get to be 2′ long). They only grow to be between four and six inches long, but they don’t co-habit well and my tank can’t support that many newcomers, so I’ll need to find homes for them and for the baby mollies and the offspring of any other fish that decide to reproduce in my tank.

 

I had no intention of getting into the fish-breeding business, but it looks like I succeeded, anyway, just by creating the right conditions for them to be sufficiently happy to become parents! 

Here’s what an adult pleco looks like…

 

 

Here’s a great link to videos of baby plecos at their various stages.  According to one of the videos, my baby plecos are probably about 16 days old. They don’t still have egg sacks attached and are behaving just like big ones:

 

UPDATE 11/20/2021  There are a few more baby plecos this morning. I think they’re managing to slip by dad and get out. When he finally comes out, he’ll probably have a lot more with him! Can’t wait to see them all!