We’ve had two bushynose plecos in our 29 gallon fish tank forever, and one of them is just starting to show bristles.

We had a pleco breeding cave, which we call a taco, because it’s white and looks like a folded, soft shell taco, in our clown pleco tank, but they clowns don’t seem to be breeding, so we decided to move it to the bushynose tank Tuesday.

Friday, I looked and saw the brown pleco, Spike, which I’m assuming is the male, in the taco, acting funny, and I looked and I saw little orange dots in the back of the cave.

We had eggs!

I was so excited, but Q-Tip, our other bushynose pleco is albino and not showing any bristles at all yet. We didn’t buy the plecos at the same store so I didn’t know if they are the same species, so I was thinking that the eggs might not be fertile.

But it looks like they were, because last night I looked in the taco and saw babies!

They are so cute, but they are pretty far back in the taco, so I can’t see much of them.

I’ve looked around online and it looks like you can feed bushynose pleco (also known as bristlenose pleco) fry french cut green beans, blanched zucchini, cooked skinned peas, and/or algae tablets - basically you can feed them what you feed the adults, so they are supposed to be pretty easy to care for.

I’ve also heard that the fry, like all plecos, produce a lot of waste, so we’ll have to increase the water changes in their tank.

The only fish in the aquarium now are 9 Harlequin Rasboras, and two African Dwarf Frogs. We had our female betta, Sparrow, in there, but we moved her out because we figured that she was the most likely to eat the fry.

Of course the frogs might eat them too, I’ve heard of them eating guppy fry, so we’ll see what happens.

I’m not sure what we’ll do with the fry, male bristlenose plecos are known to fight, and we did have one other pleco that ended up dying, probably due to injuries that were sustained while fighting with Spike, so I don’t want to keep more than one male in a tank, and all of the other tanks either have plecos, or can’t have them because we’re trying to get eggs in them.

We got our plecos when they were about an inch long, so they were too young to tell if they were male or female. I guess that was a pretty bad idea, but I haven’t seen to many full grown BN plecos for sale either.

The pleco fry are to small now to get pictures, but I’ll get some as soon as I can to share with you.

Oh yeah I almost forgot to tell you - I think Spike is the male, because the male plecos guard and fan the eggs and fry. It kind of looks like Spike is jumping up in the water, and waving his fins when he’s fanning, and if anyone other than Q-tip got too close to the taco he’d chase them off.

It was fun to watch the eggs, and now I can’t wait to see the fry grow up!