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I'm thinking of adding some ottos to my 37 g planted tank that will eventually house my lone Angelfish. Every once in awhile, we hear horror stories about ottos attaching themselves to other fish...any of you keep the two together?

"I am a believer in punctuality, though it makes me very lonely" EV Lucas

I never heared that Ottos attach to other fish. I don't see any problems with Angels & Ottos. Usually a CAE will suck on the fish.


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Yeah I think you may have confused CAE with ottos. Ottos are harmless.

i had ottos in with angels a while back, no damage was done

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Billy was a scientist, Billy is no more. For what he thought was H20, was H2SO4

I think the only problem might be if the angel tries to snack on an otto. How big are they in comparison to neon tetras, the angels natural prey in the wild?

Well u r def right about the ottos tryin to suck the slime, mine do it all the time to the corys, never my angels though, well i never see it newayz. You wouldnt have anything to worry about though when the fish squiggles to get the otto off it leaves and goes about the business, but i see it happen alomost weekly

If any sucker mouth fish is not supplied with sufficient palatable suitable foodstuff, it can learn to target slimecoat as a food substitute.

Flat sided, relatively slow moving fish like angels and disus are particularly easy targets.

Once a fish gets a taste for slimecoat, it may keep coming back for more, even when appropriate foods are present. In other words, if fish was starved somewhere bewteen the wild and your tank, it may have developed a bad habit.

If the habit persits even with regular addition of suitable good food, the only recourse is to trade in the offending fish. When they rasp off slime, they open the fish up to infection. The attacks also appear to be stressful to the target fish.

I have sucessfully kept otos (and larger sucked mouth fish) with discus and angels. Early on, I did have to trade in a couple of offending otos, but the rest were fine and never developed the bad habit.

I just put a few ottos in with my semi-agressive tank and the lepordius hauled off and ate at least one of them, he is prolly still on the hunt... well no, i just fed them so...

Otos, like many other sucker mouthed fish have a defense feeature - spines.

While your fish may have survived attacking an oto, you may find a fish with one firmly wedged deep within it mouth, unable to go further down or be ejected.

In this event, you will likely find it impossible to extract without slicing it into little pieces whilst still in the mouth of the aggressor. If this surgical extraction fails, the aggressor will likely perish.

I would net out any remaining otos from your tank and move them into a tank with smaller mouthed fishes.

In a similar fashion, cichlids have been killed by corydoras when they make the mistake of considering them for dinner.

The agresser was fine, he ate it in pieces... He now has taken up resedence next door in the tank i set up for my friend because he ate my plants also... so they had room and took him