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What a wonderful fish. Eats algae, stays fairly small, doesn't bother the other fish. Learning how to keep and breed these fish has been a terrific experience.To start with, males have the bristles, females do not. They love slices of zuchinni or patty pan squash.
This breeding information is from my experience. It is not intended to be the gospel. New and better methods are sure to be found. Have the courage to experiment and see what your fish like the best. The time periods are mainly guesses, since I could never see down into the gravel cave until the babies were starting to come out a lot. That was about 3 months.
A little history. I picked up 2 males and 2 females and put them into a 29 gallon community heavily planted aquarium. A friend jokingly said I should put a pot in one corner and see if they would spawn. Off I went to get a regular gardening 4" clay pot. I put it the corner next to a large Amazon Sword plant. I never saw the fighting, but within a week I had 1 male and 1 female alive, and one of each dead. So I strongly suggest one pair to the tank if breeding is the goal. Maybe putting several pots would let multiple pairs work things out. I will try that in the future, but I only have the one pair.
The male didn't think much of the pot itself, but proceeded to dig a hole under the pot and beside the Amazon Sword plant. He slowly uprooted the plant and got a pretty good size hole carved out.
He would attach to the side of the pot and do a little fanning dance by the hour. The female would keep watching and would venture over to be near him. This went on for almost a day and a half. Finally the female came all the way over and entered his little dug out area with him. They would both be inside the hole for maybe 10 seconds. they repeated this off and on for half a day. Luckily this happened over a weekend and I have 6 hours of video tape. when I can I will edit this down and put some pics up of the spawning process. It is really something.
Finally the female took off and for the next several weeks the male was always in the hole. He almost never came out all the way. Constant fanning of the eggs kept moving his hole around. He would valiently try to redig the hole. About a week later, he would make quick mad dashes to the food and then dive back into the hole. After about 5 weeks, 1" babies could be seen around the edge of the pot and venturing on to sword leaves. At the slightest sign of danger, the babies would dive back into the hole and the male would 'plug the hole'. To feed the fry, the male would swim out quickly to the zuchinni slice, scrape off a big piece and take it back to the hole to feed the fry.
After all this, I ended up with 5-6 dwarf bristlenose babies about 2" long.
I knew I was on the right track, I just did not have the right breeding container. Luckily I found Rosenthal Pottery http://www.rosenthalpottery.com They make all kinds of little caves and breeding devices for cichlids and other fish. I found one that looked like a place to start, ordered it and put it in the tank next to the other pot. Immediately the male moved over to it but the the hole wasn't quite big enough. He couldn't get in. I took the pot out and chipped out a bigger hole, used a file to smooth out the edges and put the pot back in. Wow, bliss in the tank. The male immediately dove into the pot, swam around it, and dug a little hole on one side. Somehow he managed to move the second spawn into this new cave. The fry from this second spawning is much larger and starting to swim around.
I think there is a third spawn now. The male spends his time half in and half out of the cave, upside down, finning furiously.
Rosenthal pottery has some new designs that look even more exciting. I got from them (3) 7" long tubes with 2" holes. I can't wait to get one or two of these into the tank and see what the favorite is. I will have to wait until I can catch some of the existing little ones because the tank is getting pretty crowded. These new tubes look like a winner to me. These should work really well for the plecos that are slightly larger.
7/15/2001 I managed to catch 5 babies. One is from the first spawn and the others are from the second. This pic is them in a plastic container floating in their new grow out tank.
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