Loaches Online Forum

Hello all,

I'm new to keeping loaches, though not new to keeping fish. I have a heavily planted 30 gallon tank and just purchased 4 sidthimunki botia to go in it. They're really adorable and frisky and I'd like to ensure that I'm doing as much as possible to keep them happy.

In this tank I have 5 juvenile Siamese algae eaters (which the botia are always schooling with), 3 juvenile honey gourami's and a several otocinculus (which are only temporary inhabitants, since they're being moved to a different tank soon), 3 amano shrimp and a bunch of cherry shrimp.

I use black "eco-complete" substrate and was wondering if this stuff was too rough for sidthimunki barbels? I feed them thawed frozen blood worms and tetra min crisp-flakes, any recommendations for better foods?

Eco complete is a great substrate for them. I used to have this in my 29, and i think it was almost as soft as sand. As for foods, brine shrimp, sinking pellot, sinking wafers, etc. will all be eaten up.

Congrats on your new Sid's

It sounds like you are doing everything right, as far as food is concerned they will take pretty much anything but most frozen foods are readily accepted and they do like Spirulina flake if you can get hold of it.

You may want to add some more Sid's to your shoal eventually, they do best in shoals of 6 or more, basically the more you have the more you will see of their true character.

I have 36 and they are amazing to watch

Thanks for all the advice thus far- I bought the last 4 sid's that were at my lfs (this is maybe only the 3rd/4th time I;ve ever seen them for sale). If I see them again, i'll definitely pick up a few more.

Another question: one of them seems particularly fat, though just as active as the rest of them. Could these be eggs (I guess not, since they're so hard to breed)? Parasite?

Some do tend to be a lot chunkier than others, these could well be females, whether full of eggs or not you cant really be sure.