Brown spots on my plant?

[bfensty]

One of my plants has gotten some brown spots on it recently, is it dying have a disease, or is this normal?

[MSG]

If you have a snail or some shrimp, they would clean that up in about a week.

I'm pretty sure that's brown algae aka diatoms.

It didn't appear OVERNIGHT, from the photo you posted it looks like it's taken at least 2 weeks to grow.

[bfensty]

Its taken a while to grow on there however my ghost shrimp havnt done much about it, I'm actually getting a bamboo shrimp tomorrow do you think that would help?

[tiggity]

Oto cats will clean those up

[MSG]

Highly recommend against a bamboo.
There's no way they would climb a plant to try to clean the leaves, they're not designed to do that.

I have 100's of plant stems in my tanks, but I wouldn't buy a bamboo shrimp they would absolutely starve in my tank after 1 week. B-shrimps stand still like statues with their "fans" wide open collecting microbes/algae out of the water. If you see them digging for food, that means they're STARVING.

If you want something to clean up the brown algae on your plants/decorations get either a.....

• amano shrimp (much better for algae than ghosts)
• oto cat since they can swim

Oto cats do prefer to be in groups of 5 or more, but I don't know if your tank is large enough. Small than 5 cats, they'll be very freaked out and hide most of the time.

Also they would eat all algae within 2-3 days and then you'll have to offer them some of your salad greens in addition to algae pellets/tabs to keep them well fed.

Totally your choice when you stop by the pet store what to bring home.

[tiggity]

Completely forgot about oto cats or any algae eater in my previous post. Do not rely just on algae as their food source, supplement them with algae wafers or cucumber/zuccini as part of their diet.