This is my first post here, so please bear with me if I mess up with the photo links.
I started keeping Corys about a year ago, a troupe of three C. Paleatus (2xf, 1xm). They share a 60 litre tank with a few Amano Shrimp & a jungle of plants.
What little I know about Catfish is largely thanks to mining this (wonderful) site for information. It seems to have paid off as, not only are they all still alive but, since late August, have been spawning every other day. (They are in fact "at it" as I type).
C. Paleatus may not be the most exotic Cory, and the spawning procedure no more than "add water and stand clear", but they are beautiful wee creatures and their antics are a never ending source of amusement & fascination. So, I thought I'd (try to) share a few of the many pictures I've taken of them.
The spawnings usually start in the early morning - the male's opening gambit is to "tickle" the females on their foreheads with his whiskers.
If he gets any sort of reaction then lots of high speed chasing ensues. The male tends to "hover" in the current before darting after the object of his affections. The females tend to swim rapidly up and down the glass and make high speed circuits of the tank with the male in hot pursuit.
When in the "T" position, the female is usually faced head to the current.
I've observed the females deposit the eggs between their fins prior to the "T", during the "T", and after the "T". I've even seen them go through the entire pantomime with no eggs in evidence at all.
They seem to produce 3-5 eggs at a time. It is difficult to say how many eggs they produce per session as the females tend to eat them within minutes of placing them. (Never seen the male do this - only the females).
The tank glass (especially if it has been cleaned recently) and Vallisineria are the favoured egg placement sites. They infrequently use Java Fern but never the Ceratopteris, Java Moss, H. Polysperma or Cryptocorynes.
I only manage to rescue a tiny fraction of the eggs laid - of these, most prove to be fertile. The fish are sufficiently used to me that they carry on spawning even whilst I'm poking around in the tank scraping eggs off the glass. They are also quite unfazed by flash photography - though they do sometimes pause and shoot me a quizzical look as if wondering what on earth I'm up to.
In my experience, the eggs take ~150 hours (at 21 C) before hatching.
The eggs darken and, the developing fry is just about visible inside.
It took me a few attempts before I could get the fry to survive more than 24hours.Initially I tried a plastic tub with airstone floated on the parent's tank, but found that the fry all died within 24 hours of hatching.
I then tried the same tub outside of the tank with a bit more success - perhaps overheating due to the lighting was the problem.
The next hurdle seemed to be at the 7-9 day mark. I lost a lot of fry to (I believe) fungal infections - their fins & barbels did not develop properly with the result that they starved once they'd consumed their yolk sac.
Adding a few drops of Melafix with the daily water changes resolved this.
The next batch, I split 50-50 between the tub and a breeding net suspended in a mature 30 Litre planted shrimp tank. The fry in the breeding net grew at an astonishing rate compared to those in the tub, so I transferred all of the fry to the breeding net & have dispensed with the tub, other than for initial hatching of the eggs..
Last weekend I set up another 30 litre tank with a sponge filter which will be a dedicated Cory fry tank. It has been seeded with filter gloop from the other tanks and last night the first hatchlings from the most recent batch of eggs went in. The shrimps in the shrimp only tank thrive on a diet of filter gloop/leaf litter alone, so my hope is it will also prove a good food source for Cory fry (and avoid the maintenance overheads associated with e.g. Liquifry).
The eldest surviving fry are now about 4-5 weeks old, are starting to look like Cory's and seem to be doing reasonably well, I plan to transfer these older ones gradually to the new 30 litre tank once it has had a few more days to sort itself out.
This pic shows a newly hatched fry on the left with two older fry (~4 wk) in middle/right. The newly hatched fry are very pale, but darken over the first 24 hours or so.
Anyway, that's it. Thanks for reading, I hope there was something of use/interest there.
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