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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Surprised to hear about the pleco getting big. Usually fish adapt to the size of their environment. So a fish that can get pretty big if it were living in a large tank or out in the wild would grow in proportion to the tank size and be considerable smaller in a smaller tank.[/quote]

This is a common misunderstanding.  Obviously the fish can't grow bigger than its tank.  But the fish will grow as large as it possibly can given the space, air, and water quality.  For big species, "as large as it possibly can" means "larger than is healthy for that space."   You end up with a fish that is deformed or sick or dead, depending on how bad the mismatch is.

Think about it: if someone kept a kitten in a shoe box and never took it out, of course the kitten would not grow bigger than the shoe box.  It might not die, either.  But the kitten would not become a miniature version of a healthy adult cat.  There's nothing about fish that makes them "adapt" differently than that, except maybe that their health problems are less obvious to us because we don't normally interact with cold-blooded underwater things.

Anyway, I'm late to this thread and just wanted to +1 all the people saying not to get plecos.  Good luck to OP, and if the current fish don't do well, maybe look into a small heater for your tank.  There's a "flat" style that's inexpensive and doesn't take up much room.[/quote]

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