Barbel Erosion Observation (Updated)

[Dantu]

Good day, everyone. I have a 55g community tank that has been setup for about 9 months. It has 2 skunk corydoras, 2 adult bronze corys, and school of black skirt tetras. I wasn't going to mix species originally but I've been having trouble finding more skunks so I decided to pivot away from them. I recently added 4 more juvenile bronze cories.

Long story short, I was away for work for about 2 weeks and I came back the juvie corys are all missing their barbels. The substrate is the natural looking river gravel (similar to Caribsea Supernatural line). I know what some of you are going to say: the gravel did it, you need to keep them on sand. The only other time I've had a problem with barbel erosion in cories was a few years ago, with panda corys, and that tank had a playground sand substrate.

Fair enough, so your tank must be dirty. I removed all the decor last night so I could capture and move the afflicted fish to a hospital tank and low and behold, NONE of the adults have any erosion. If there was tank maintenance issue, I would think it would be all of them.

Doing research I stumbled across a fantastic video by YouTuber FISHSTORY! where he suggested inadequate food might cause corys to try digging so much they injure themselves. I think this might be an underrated cause of erosion and is consistent with what I'm dealing with. I think I scared my guest feeder about the dangers of overfeeding and they may have been erring on the side of caution and underfeeding. Perhaps the adults, with their size were able to outcompete the juvies for the food that was available leaving the youngsters to struggle. At any rate, they are now in a hospital tank to heal up.

Bottom line: I think underfeeding may be a cause of barbel erosion that warrants equal consideration with substrate and tank conditions.

[bekateen]

Hi Dantu,

Thanks for sharing this. Please add updates if you gain more insight.

Cheers, Eric

[Dantu]

The youngsters are still in QT and being treated, I was hoping for quicker progress on the regrowth. The adults in the display tank still have their barbels.

[Dantu]

Update - I ended up moving all but the most severely eroded (2 bronze corys) back to the display tank after a round of treatment Furan 2. I kept the those 2 in QT and tried API Fungal Cure as well. One of them had pretty shocking mouth rot, pretty graphic to look at. Sadly nothing worked and she passed away. I returned the survivor to the display tank.

I increased feeding in the display tank with an emphasis on sinking wafers. I am very pleased to report that all of the cory cats have regrown most or all of their barbels. Other than the increased feeding, no changes were made to substrate, or husbandry and no additional medications were used.