Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hey everybody i don't know if any of you have tried this or if any of you have thought of something like this but here goes. i went down to the local walmart and i bought two Placo's the sucker fish that clean fish tanks, and the turtles leave them alone i have three allys in the tank and now two placo's so far they have been left alone and the placos went nuts on the glass. its spotless. i dont know about everyone else but i think its pretty cool. Also i was wondering what these "rosies" are that everyone keeps talking about i have been feeding mine a few gold fish and some guppies and some aquatic turtle food but i want to try to find out what the rosies are i found a fish called a rosy barb that costs 1.18 per fish and i thought that "rosies" were only feeders and feeder goldfish are ten cents per fish. i want to avoid feeding my snappers any more gold fish though because of their inability to process copper sulfate. any help would be great.

"rosies" are rosie red minnows. They should be near the feeder goldfish at the pet store you go to. They are smaller than feeder goldfish but are suppose to be a better feeder. You also might want to check and see if you have a local bait shop. The one near my house has all sizes and types of live minnows. I usually feed my allys the fathead minnows and they love em.

fatheads=rosies

I didn't know Rosies were same as Fatheads. Maybe the rosies are baby fatheads? The fatheads that I get are so much bigger than the rosies at the pet store.

Re: rosies, I've seen them sold with the name "pinkies" and "tuffies". They're probably a better feeder than goldfish, which are notoriously dirty & loaded w/parasites. Bait minnows are usually good too, whatever you can find will probably be better than goldfish, maybe shiners, fatheads, chubs, whatever. I used to get frozen minnows called silverside, fed 'em to all kinds of big fish & turtles - this was years ago so not sure if you can still get 'em, they were sold by one of the frozen brineshrimp distributors I think.

Re: the plecos, yeah they'll do a good job. They might even last with the ally's as long as they're bigger, and they get up around 2 feet long I think. I think common's would chew on 'em though. I wonder if they'll clean the turtle's shells too?

yes as a matter of fact the placos do clean the turtles shells i saw it happen today i thought that was really cool.