At 0.38 - that loach is ENORMOUS! They are very playful & seem very 'fond' of your (pleco?!)
Ha, ha. It looks like they are pestering him but I know he is totally unfazed by them
That loach is 9 inches. He's a female and they are normally larger than the males
I happened to measure her by accident as she stood over a knife that held a cucumber and covered the lot of it. The knife is 9 inches
This loach is my largest and oldest. She was a rescue. I've personally had her for just over 3 years. I found her in a small local pet shop which only sells goldfish. . She was abandoned by its previous owner in there and held in a 10G tank in the shop, quite stressed out. I didn't want to buy her at first not wanting to risk the health of my current loaches but kept returning to check on her, hoping someone had picked her up. After seeing her stressing out for two weeks, I bought her.
She must had been kept as a lone loach previously because it took her ages to join my other group of loaches ( I only had 5 at the time). By ages I mean months and months swimming solitary but she is now the alpha loach and leads the group, and quite friendly at that, so I got lucky. The previous alpha, which is the second largest loach I have at only 4 years old, was always very skittish, so was the entire shoal of fish because of that. Now that they follow this loach, its an entirely different story.
she has grown lots since I bought her, at around 1 inch per year which is extremely fast for a clown loach. She literally eats like a pig. If I am not careful, she's capable of eating all blood worms in one go, several cubes worth, because she shoots for my hand and just wipes everything like a good "puppy"
That's how she looked like the day after I got her in 2013
A year later in 2014 when she could still fit in her favourite tube without sticking half her body out...
In 2015 below. The picture is not great but you can notice she's grown in length as she's more elongated.
And here she is the biggest in the bunch from today 2016, 3 years later and a lot of patience to get her to like me