I have discussed on this website how plecos can eat all types of food. Pretty much any natural food you can think of is on the table for plecos.
To answer the question, plecos can eat cucumbers. In fact, cucumbers are one of the foods that I recommend feeding plecos. It does take some preparation to feed them cucumbers and there are some things you need to do, but it’s totally worth feeding your plecos cucumbers.
Preparing Cucumbers for Plecos
As mentioned earlier, it does take some prep work on the cucumbers in order to feed them to your plecos. It’s not much prep work, but it is some work.
All you have to do is slice the cucumber, blanch the slices, and wash them with tap water.
The reason for blanching is twofold:
- It makes the cucumbers softer, which aids in chewing. They can eat raw cucumbers, but it will take a little longer as cucumbers can be a tad hard.
- Blanched cucumbers will sink to the bottom of the tank. This is important because plecos are bottom feeders.
That’s it for all the prep work required to feed a cucumber to a pleco.
I recommend blanching the cucumbers by boiling them for a few minutes and then immediately dunking them in ice water for ~5 minutes.
This should take 10 minutes or so in total. You can even speed up the process by microwaving the cucumbers in a cup of water. But I don’t like that because the microwave has a tendency to make the cucumbers rather chewy.
Do Plecos Like Cucumbers?
Yes, plecos really like cucumbers. I would rank it as one of their favorite foods along with brocoli and zucchini.
This is perfect because it’s an extremely affordable food and doesn’t make the tank a complete mess like bananas.
Closing Thoughts
To summarize, plecos love cucumbers. Just make sure to blanch them before putting them in the tank. They’re an extremely easy food to feed fish and should have little to no impact on your tank parameters.