Outbreak: Oto Edition

**oneman** · 06-29-2012, 05:41 PM

This is a report of my experience with some Otos that I made mention in a different thread. First of all, I want to note that hindsight is 20/20.
I have a 40 gallon planted tank stocked with neon tetras, rummy nose tetras, juli cory cats, kuhli loaches, ghost shrimp, bn pleco, flying fox (which was sold to me as an sae), chinese algae eater, and zebra snails.

Being that my planted tank has a manageable amount of algae, I decided to jump on the $1 per Oto sale going on at my local Petsmart. I have never had any type of success with Otos but I figured that I’d give them another try. The manager fished out 5 of them for me. The first red flag I ignored was that those were a fresh shipment. At a buck per, I figured that if a couple died, I’d still be good (cost-wise).

When I got home (less than 45mins) I found that one had already died. I put the other four in and proceeded to get my oto exchanged. I picked up four more for a total of 10. During the next three days there were die offs. It was a buck and I was prepared to lose a few. With attrition, I was finally left with three (as of today).

In a separate tank, I have a ghost and cherry shrimp breeding colony. When I found an oto corpse, I’d net it out and feed it to the shrimp. One night late, I found an oto corpse in the tank and saw that one of my julis was snacking on it. I figured that I’d leave it for the other fishes to snack on. Next morning, I found a kuhli corpse. As I was netting it out, I found the juli corpse behind the driftwood. I cursed myself for leaving the otc corpse. I knew better especially after finding out from this URL (http://www.otocinclus.com/newoto.html) that asserts that cyanide is used to catch otos in the wild. I immediately net out the khuli corpse and the juli corpse so that their buddies cant snack on them and die a quick death.

Last night, I check on my khulis and find that they are fine. This morning I had to net out two more khuli corpses.
From this, the lesson is: QT. I wished that I had QT my otos in the shrimp colony before throwing them in the main tank. It could have been worst. They could have killed off my group of 4 tropheus moorii moorii.

**es31710** · 06-29-2012, 06:54 PM

Sorry for your losses. It is a good idea to QT especially for a tank that size. I think you can pull two lessons out of this. Even though the fish is cheap never ignore red flags. Secondly never let your fish snack on corpses if you see them. They could have something wrong with them and transfer disease to the other fish.

**openbook** · 06-29-2012, 11:09 PM

sorry to hear

**Lady Hobbs** · 06-29-2012, 11:20 PM

Since you've had a juli, ottos and khuli all die, I would be suspecting the water. You have more problems than just that of not quarantining the ottos.

**oneman** · 06-30-2012, 04:05 PM

Originally Posted by Lady Hobbs

Since you've had a juli, ottos and khuli all die, I would be suspecting the water. You have more problems than just that of not quarantining the ottos.

The tone in that response is not being recieved well at the moment. The word, "may" would have soften it much. I have been lurking on this forum for a while now. There is good info here and there but it seems that this forum has typical forum issues. A select group will own it and push out non like minded people. I see it happening here.

This forum should be called, "the Water Quality Forum." Granted, water is the foundation, too often the diagnosis is water. If anyone disagrees, they get bashed on. It almost seems like thats what people ONLY know around here.

One cant post without first providing a comment that water tests came back negative.

If you are concerned about retaining forum members and are concerned about the hobby, you'd digest my rant instead of discounting as another lunatic ranting about nonesense.

**CrunchyLeaf** · 06-30-2012, 08:08 PM

I'm sorry that you didn't like the answer that you got. I've heard that complaint before about there being a clique of people on the forum who harp on about the same thing. Usually it's from someone who doesn't want to acknowledge the shortcomings of their tank. I'm not saying that's the case here, just my observation of where that complaint has come from in the past.

Unfortunately it's a darned if you do, darned if you don't situation. If someone thinks there are other issues causing your problem, and they don't speak up, you may come back a month later saying "Why didn't anyone tell me?"

If someone comes in and says that you have other things that you can look at to resolve your problem, they get chastised for speaking up.

The members on this forum are here to help you with your problems and offer advice in the best way they know how. You can take it or leave it.

One thing to keep in mind is that, no matter how badly you want the answer to be 5, we will always tell you that 2+2 is 4.