hi everyone Colin here and welcome back to another aquarium video today I want to talk more about the
best algae eating animals that we can have in our aquariums that make an enormous difference to
reducing the work that you have to do and keep the tank looking really really clean without
too much effort and also in this video I'd touch on the worst that you can possibly have in your
aquarium and the reasons for that so let's get into the video now by far I guess the number one
best algae eating fish you'd have in an aquarium is the siamese algae eater made famous by takashi amano and
it's a very plain fish it doesn't look like much itself very peaceful very quiet fish it makes
no enemies of anybody but it's an incredibly good algae eater now you get them when they're
often very small when they're small you can't see much difference but there are different varieties and
that becomes clear as they get older but on the whole most of those fish sold as algae eaters
will be a good algae eater they do need though a larger size tank another of the best algae eating
fish is the ancistrus catfish which is often sold as a bristlenose catfish and just make sure
you don't get one that's called a pleco fish that are plecostomus are the huge ones often growing to
a foot and size these ones are much much smaller going to about three or four inches they have an
enormous size mouth and that suction mouth does an incredibly good job cleaning algae they're a
very hard-working algae eating fish but they can give broad leafed plants a hard time so
it's important to supplement their diet regularly with some extra greens be it's spinach be it some
zucchini cucumber something to keep that tummy full because if they graze on broadleaf plants
too often the leaves do get a bit scraped and beaten so make sure they've got plenty of greens
and they'll eat algae for you but whatever fish you have the fact is that your timer is going to
be probably one of the biggest controlling agents of what keeps algae under control you need to
make sure your light is very set to a controlled time period otherwise you can have a tremendous
looking tank for a certain period of time if you do it the light manually on and off but at
some point it's very hard to manually keep the on and off very regular and sometimes if you miss it
the tank will in fact end up with too much light or not enough light so keeping a tank looking good
it does depend on a regularity of the same photo period the timer is very important make sure you
have one because this tank didn't have a timer I was doing it manually and I put a brighter light
on this tank and it threw things out of balance so I got an algae eater to help me catch up to
get back into balance and I got this fantastic looking golden mystery snail what a beautiful
little animal it looks like and I'm sure it is but as much as snails are known for being algae
eaters this particular one is probably the worst algae eating creature that I could have put in my
tank because what happened was within days they ate a lot of things they certainly did eat algae
but as well as the algae they also ate my plants and remember that beautiful carpet that I was so
happy with well as you can see in the background there there's almost none of it left this carpet
has been destroyed and these snails are terrific and they're very good algae eaters in probably a
non planted aquarium but when it came to the baby tears that were making the carpet in this tank
they just ate it all look at that now it's not all bad news the snails simply had to be taken back to
the shop where I swapped them over for something a little less hungry than what these guys have
been and the bits and pieces of the stems of the baby tears going to grow back so within a number
of weeks I will reshow this tank hopefully in a better condition than what it is now and
once these plant eating algae eating snails are removed and the tank will get back to a bit of
its former glory but nonetheless just be careful not every algae eater is going to be just what you
thought it was going to be these golden mystery snails perhaps a little too good at their job
so I hope you've learned some things today and I hope that your aquariums are going
well so click here for more videos and we will see you on the next one
you