# 3 Kois and a Pleco...



## EDO (Dec 14, 2014)

First time poster here! I want to share a story and a few question.

I have a 70G aquarium with 3 kois and a pleco. Yes, many of you will tell me that kois belongs in a pond and not an aquarium, but keep in mind that this is Canada and there are a lot of rules on keeping a running pond in our backyard. I have 3 kois which I have for about 6 years now and a pleco which was 4 years old. Recently I began to see the kois looking a bit mellow at times, just sitting at the bottom. Upon a closer inspection, I noticed that the pleco would occasionally suck on kois' scale. I looked it up online and I found that my pleco has acquired a taste for the koi's coat. The strange thing is that the kois are almost 3 times the size of the pleco and yet they didn't choose do anything to deter the pleco's aggressive action.

Red marks appeared on one of the kois and I decided I had to separate them. I constructed an isolation chamber to separate the pleco hoping that I could make the pleco fight off this habit. Despite of my attempt to keep the pleco well fed with algae waffles, the pleco died just one day after isolation. After the pleco's death, the 3 kois looked very happy again: they are now more willing to swim around than before. Now for the questions:

1) Why did the pleco died just one day after isolation? Its obvious that the pleco didn't like being isolated in a chamber, but I don't understand how it could die in just 1 day.
2) This happened one week ago and there are still red marks on one of the kois. I have put in some stress coat into the tank, the said koi looks to be happy. Do I need to do anything else to help this fish?


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## brycon (Aug 5, 2014)

I found Melafix to really help my goldies heal when they had red sores.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

Could have just simply been the stress of being moved that killed the pleco. Another possibility is plecos like to munch on wood, if there was no wood in the tank for them, they might have tried the koi instead and maybe the slime from the koi is bad for plecos to eat or something


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