Breeding corys
The first corydoras I bred as a teenager was Corydoras aenus – the bronze corydoras.
It wouldn?t be a big stretch to assume that this could even be the first catfish that many
of us kept based on advice from the local fish store that “they will clean up the bottom
of the tank for you”. Sound familiar? Depending on finances many of us probably
bought perhaps just one or two fish and didn?t think about keeping them in a school.
My first attempts at breeding bronze catfish went surprisingly well. I found that by
feeding the corys up on white worms until the females got fat, doing a 75% water
change with cold water and then generating heaps of water movement with pumps and
airstones I could get them to spawn. I was able to do the same with Peppered Catfish
(Corydoras paleatus) and Corydoras trilineatus (often misdescribed as Corydoras
julii). I am pretty sure these are the easiest of the corys to breed.
You can tell when corys are ready to breed as they get very active. One or two males
follow a female around the tank and they form a T shape to fertilise the egg. The resulting eggs or eggs are then held between the ventral fins of the female who then
searches for a site to deposit the eggs. The eggs are usually deposited in areas of
strong current or in the top third of the tank , mine usually place most of the eggs in
floating plants that are being circulated by the current or very unhelpfully in the top
back corners of the aquarium.
Corys in breeding condition are easy to sex , the male is almost always much slimmer
and smaller than the female and the female will be noticeably broader around the middle. This difference is most pronounced when viewed from above or behind.
I fed the resulting fry up on microworms and powdered flake food and it all worked
out pretty well. In no time at all I had schools of 20 or 30 corys of different types all
swimming around and that was when I realised that was how corys should be kept. In
fact if you want to see corys in the wild have a look at the video we posted on the
CDAS Facebook page where you can see they
swim in schools of many hundreds.
CORYDORAS STERBAI EGGS