I ordered 6 and 5 lived, so I cant complain. They are doing great, they are cute in their little school...But I havent seen them do much to the algae. Does this take time, or do they munch speratically.(sp)

I got a small school of oto cats and when I added 4 sae the
oto cats started schooling with the SAE.

I later added 8 Roseline Barbs - denosoni barbs - and all my
otos and sae got really confused - for awhile I had a school
of otos, sae and barbs.

But now the otos have decided that can't keep up the sae
have finally figured out those guys with red stripes are'nt
brothers - but it was funny while it lasted.

My SAE eat more algae the less I feed them - so if the aglae
is getting heavy I just feed less

My little SAE's are algae monsters, one day after adding them i had to add algae wafers cause they had cleaned out the entire tank! the ottos helped a lot too

IMHO and IME the best clean up crew possible is a bunch of Cherry's, like 10 Amanos, 7 Otto's and 2 or 3 SAE's. NO ALGAE but BGA can stand up to that! Trust me!

My SAE's cleared my sword of BBA, and that's about it. My wisteria is covered in BBA, they don't seem to be helping me much. Hope the 2L bottle of excel will help more than them.

Eventually they'll stop eating algae. Once they get a taste for what ever food you feed that tank for the other fish, they'll start eating that instead of algae. There's also the posability that you don't have real saes. In my experience, you only get a year of usefull algea eating out of them before they get big and lazy. For algae eating, I much prefer snails.

nope real saes, I orded them from sunpet..I work at a fish store...ordered them by scientific name.

Sometimes they are misidentified. Just because you order by scientific name doesn't mean you get the right one. They are easily confused with other fish like the flying fox.

how big are they?

the big ones will kinda just snack on it every few hours. the young ones eat 24/7 (litterally, i see them eat at 11pm and at 5am)

they are small, possibbly under a inch.....I ordered flying fox's too, and they look similar, but different...I know how to tell the difference They started doing their job, I think they were just shocked from coming into the store, and then me catching them again, same day and taking them home into my tank...They are settled now, and eating away. Its so funny tho, they school with the flying fox's.