What sorts of tankmates did you put him in with? We had a bristlenose named Uglifish who was with us for several years, succumbing only to the stresses of two days in a gallon mayonnaise jar in the front seat of a moving van. IIRC, she was a she rather than a he, but she coexisted with a loach and a school of barbs for most of her years. There are tricks to getting bottom-dwellers to allow each other territory, but I thought otocinculus were the real terrors of the algae-eating world...