With any luck at all, on Friday I will be saying goodbye to all but one (maybe two or three) of my plecos.

I looked up how to sex plecos, and it looks pretty straightforward to me. With the bristlenose variety, only the males have “whiskers” on their noses.

I’ll be keeping Moby Dick,  for sure, the largest one. He’s a male albino. I see another pleco in there who’s a male, and he’s a dark one. If I can find one more, I will keep all three of them and take the rest (close to 50) to the aquarium shop.

The aquarium shop says some people can’t get plecos to breed. HA!  I can’t get mine to STOP!  I have more plecos every few months than my aquarium will handle. And the aquarium shop isn’t taking them in trade for supplies anymore, so I don’t need or want to keep breeding them.

When I get them out of the tank on Friday, I’m going to give the tank a thorough scrubbing to get any algae that’s on the back wall and elsewhere scrubbed off. I rarely take everybody out of the tank all at once — maybe once a year — and when I do that, it gets thoroughly scrubbed.

I got a new, lighter background for the tank, too, and I plan to get a new filter (the one the aquarum shop swears by for all their tanks — I have enough earlier trades to get that for free this time) and about 30 pounds (maybe less) of aquarium gravel that isn’t black.  Right now I have black aquarium  gravel and I want to either replace it entirely or mix it with a lighter color (perhaps robin’s eggeblue or pink) so I can see the bottom feeders more readily.

When I get it all swapped out, I will take pictures and add them here, or to a subsequent post, so stay tuned!