Hi

[Gilraen Took]

My name is Dana, and I'm new *waves hello*. Currently I have a few cats. I have a common pleco in my south american cichlid tank named Shark. Very handsome, he had the most white out of the tank, and I like to say I rescued him from petco. He was with tons of others, and luckily I knew a bit at least about them, instead of getting one for a tiny tank only to have the poor baby starve or something

In my community tank I have a few cories. One is a panda, one a 'regular' green, one a 'peppered' and I don't know the exact name of the 4th. All I know for sure is that petsdumb had him labeled as a spotted. That one doesn't Look like any of the spotted ones on this site though.

Also I have a couple of small plecos. One was labeled a clown, the other a bristlenose. I'll put pictures of them up in the identification forum later though, since I haven't seen a bn with mine's markings. From the picture I found earlier, on a fish sales site he looks just like a vampire>_> And since they sold me one under a possibly wrong label I just want to check on the other

I do have a cory question though. Are they fine in mixed groups like I have now, or do I need to get a couple of the same species to make them happy? I've noticed that my panda is the only really active one, the others just seem to like to swim around a bit, lounge around a bit and eat. Been feeding them algae wafers and shrimp pellets. And the big pleco gets that plus spinach, which so far is the only veggie anything in that tank goes for.

[Coryman]

There are a couple of points I think are worth mentioning. The first being that Corys are omnivores not vegetarian, although they may naturally consume some vegetable matter while grazing for the bio-film in search of insect larvae, small crustaceans, worms and other minute aquatic life forms. There are other types of tablet and granular foods on the market designed for bottom feeding fish. These can be used as a staple diet, the addition of live or frozen will then give a better balanced diet.

The second point is that Corys are a shoaling fish and should ideally be in groups of their own kind. Just having single specimens of several species you risk the possibility of cross-breeding. Corydoras panda in particular is one species that is renown for mating with other species.

Ian