I don't have clown loaches but I do have two four-inch botias. I've never

My clowds like to root around in the substrate too. My forground plants
are
mostly chain swords (Echidnidorous Tenellus), and are pretty much able to
take a licking and keep on ticking. Thx. -Bruce Geist

kush wrote in message
...

Bruce Geist wrote ...
... I have never seen thse guys do anything destructive to my plants.
What
type of behaviour
have you observed?

I don't have clown loaches but I do have two four-inch botias. I've never
seen them eat a plant but they dig incessantly and uproot everything I try
to plant in their tank. Eventually, I was reduced to only being able to
put
anubias and "clumps" of thoroughly rooted plants which I'd established in
other tanks in with them.

Then I did something REALLY stupid. I had a 2-1/2 gallon tank that I was
keeping feeder guppies in and cultivating a nice thick turf of lileaopsis
in
for eventual placement in another tank. Well, I was replanting the tank
the
botias were in and thought, well, why don't I just put them in the 2-1/2
gallon for a few days...

(more on lileaopsis later)

Back to the original thread on snails: my experience with snails is that
they are the very best scavengers and algae-eaters of all while they are
small but that, when they get larger, they are prone to damage tender
plants - particularly pinnate plants. However, when they get to that
size,
it is quite easy to pick them out of the tank and feed them to the
botias -
or crushed as guppy food, yum yum.

kush

"You can't have everything - where would you put it?"