My fish are eating my plants

Freshwater
1

I was hoping somebody could help out with my problem of my fish eating my plants.

I have a 125 gallon freshwater tank and just redid it for plants. I have in the tank one large pleco three angel fish, three electric blues, four skirted tetras, five other tetra, I can’t recall the name, they are sliver with a blue/black stripe on the side and reddish eyes. One that I thought was a parrot but turns out it wasn’t.
The last is an electric yellow and I have maybe 15 or so of them. They breed like crazy- no matter what I do! The pet store states I should dead fish all the time but I don’t. The only death was feeder gold fish that was in there when I set the tank up, eight years ago, he was well over three pounds and took a lot of room.

The fish either eat all the leaves or root up the plants. How can I stop this? The bigger fish truly decorated they want, not the way I set it up. So tips on plants they won’t eat or maybe not up root?

Thanks
Greg

2

In my experience its very difficult to keep cichlids in a planted tank for the reasons you’ve mentioned. I have only seen success with tanks that have a lot of rock work and different species of anubias plants. Since they’re rhizome-based they’ll attach to the rock work and make it difficult for the fish to uproot.