cuteusagi

Help!! My husband and I have a 29 gallon tank with good water conditions, and is well established. As posted in the signature, we have 6 zebra danios in a school, 2 cory cats, 1 angelfish, 1 bolivian ram, and 1 rubber nose pleco. A few days ago, one of our zebra danios went missing. As posted in the Zebra Danio specific forum, this danio had a birth defect and we assumed that he probably died and our corys, pleco and everything else helped "clean up." We added our pleco 4 days ago, and now he is also missing. Should we assume the same scenario? We have looked everywhere...filter, moved gravel around, under rocks, and there is no sign of him. He is a very small pleco (maybe 1-1 1/4 inches long), but we could usually always find him after a few minutes of looking. He was just there one day and gone the next.

The danios are chasing a bit more with only 5 of them, and I would like to get 1-2 more, and we really needed the pleco for some algae clean up. However, I am reluctant to get any more fish until I know where our fish are disappearing! Any ideas?? We are at a loss as to what is happening!!

Thanks always for you help and suggestions!

COBettaCouple

plecos can hide pretty well, even upside down inside of decorations.. you may have to check every side of every decoration to see if he's really gone.

cuteusagi

We have searched the tank about 3 times with everything being double-checked. We cannot find him anywhere, and it's been about 48 hours now...

COBettaCouple

maybe if you take each decoration out and carefully check it, then put it in a bucket of tank water until the tank is empty?

have you checked every part of the filter box, if you have one?

cuteusagi

Yes, we've checked everything in the filter. It's completely empty of fish. We haven't taken any of the decorations completely out of the tank, but we have dislodged them from their usual resting spots and have looked over every surface and haven't found anything. At this point, we're assuming that our little pleco and little danio just didn't make it and our other fish are really good at cleaning up.

sirdarksol

It's possible. I've heard that plecos sometimes break down pretty quickly, making it easy for other fish to get rid of the evidence.
I don't have any plecos, but I do have otos, and they have actually managed to elude very thorough searches of mine, even when I checked under everything, so it's possible, though unlikely, that you've just missed your fish.

cuteusagi

Given the time frame of when he went missing, and the fact that we do a thorough search every day, I think he's gone. He went missing about 3 days after we added him to the tank, so maybe he wasn't entirely healthy from the LFS or had trouble adjusting to the new environment. As for the danio, he lasted longer than I thought he would with the birth defect, so that wasn't entirely a surprise.

COBettaCouple

they do just disappear like that.. we just moved and took everything out of the room.. no dried up oto anywhere.. we'll never know how or where he disappeared to, just gone!