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I know a few zebra owners keep oto's with their zeb's as they don't compete and keep the algae down, but can anyone tell me whcih particular oto's you keep? I have the opportunity to buy some zebra oto's which would be cool to still have an all zebra tank but I'm not sure they will cope with the temperature.

According to planet catfish, zebra ottos like temps up to 77° F. I have a group of 8 that I keep in my community tank where the temp is at 80° with no problem so far, but they have only been in there a month. They are very active and visible, not like my otto affini that seem to be always hidden. You might want to drop in 1 or 2 as an experiment, as info on PC is not always "gospel". Another issue, at least for me, would be that although my zebra tank is well established, due to the low light and short amount of time I have the light on, there is very little, if any, algae for the ottos to eat. I am hesitant to do so only because the zebra ottos are difficult to come by here, and they are a little pricey. Let us know how it works out, as I would like to see them together also. Good luck.

vanillarum wrote:According to planet catfish, zebra ottos like temps up to 77° F. I have a group of 8 that I keep in my community tank where the temp is at 80° with no problem so far, but they have only been in there a month. They are very active and visible, not like my otto affini that seem to be always hidden. You might want to drop in 1 or 2 as an experiment, as info on PC is not always "gospel". Another issue, at least for me, would be that although my zebra tank is well established, due to the low light and short amount of time I have the light on, there is very little, if any, algae for the ottos to eat. I am hesitant to do so only because the zebra ottos are difficult to come by here, and they are a little pricey. Let us know how it works out, as I would like to see them together also. Good luck.

I have a few plants in the tank thatare doing a great job at keeping the nitrates very low so I do need some light for those, algae is the trade off. Good idea to just pop one or two in there to see first. I will probably get the zebra oto's because as you say they are hard to come by, I have another tank they can go in that's 25 degrees (77), but if anyone has experience with other oto's that would be helpful

I keep a regular and a zebra ottocinclus in with my zebra plecos. Although I used to run the temp as high as 84, I now run it closer to 82.5 and neither of the ottos ever showed any adverse reaction to such high temps. Keep in mind that they will need more food at that temperature as their metabolism will be very high. I plan to add more ottos as I believe that they act as a perfect suckermouth dither fish to help the zebra plecos feel more confident in coming out into the open aquascape.

I may try 1 or 2 zebra ottos in the zebra tank, but I keep my L046 tank at 85/86°. I do keep pygmy cories in at that temp, and they are fine.