And nothing happened.
Well by that I mean they didn?t breed , but then again I didn?t really try to help them
along either as I was quite happy to watch them swim around and grow so it is not entirely their fault. Fast forward 12 months and the sterbai became big, fully grown adults
and were moved to a 60x45x45 tank with heavy aeration in my fish room.
To get them to breed (perhaps I was lucky and they were already in the mood) I fed them
heavily on white worms for 2 weeks and when I saw the females were very rounded I
did a 75% water change and ran a heap of air into the tank. The water was so turbid that
food barely rested on the bottom and the corys would have to scoot around and scoop up
the white worms before they did another circuit of the tank.
The good news was that within a couple of days I found eggs on the glass. I have repeated this process many times since and if I am around to collect the eggs can sometimes get up to 150 eggs from my group. If the eggs are laid on the glass it is either as a
big grape like bunches of eggs in the top corners of the tank or in smaller groups of 2 to
10 eggs in clusters on the side walls.
When they lay on java fern they are more spread out but quite often still in groups of 20
eggs. I have been scraping the eggs off the glass with a razor blade (I had more success
when it got a bit rusted and blunt – it did not cut the eggs) and placing them into a spare
tank to hatch. I tried a few things but the most important thing I learnt was to try and
separate the eggs to stop the opportunity of fungus to pass from one egg to the next.
With some corys such as trilineatus and panda I have found it very easy to pluck the
eggs off the glass with my fingers and stick them 1cm apart on the wall of a rearing tank
(thanks for the tip Serkan) to stop the spread of the fungus. I often found though that the
eggs of the sterbai were not sticky enough to reaffix. My initial workaround for this was
to grab a bunch of eggs and push them either side of the razor until they are individually
separated, it takes a while! The eggs stuck to my fingers but I then swished them into a
tank filled with java moss and the eggs disappeared into the moss. My assumption is that
the odds of 2 eggs settling next to each other is pretty remote. This has worked well for
me to date and I have had more than enough eggs hatching in this manner. I keep adding
eggs to the same tank for up to 2 weeks and often mix the tank up with eggs from other
corys that happen to spawn at the same time. Once the fry are a month old the difference
in size is not so great and I then move larger juveniles out to other tanks anyway.
I have plenty of java fern on hand so when I get lazy and see a few eggs sometimes I just
grab the whole plant and swap it for another. One thing I will try next is to use spawning mops which I have read are quite a good option.