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I've had these Leopard Cory cats (Corydoras trilineatus) for 6 months now and today I saw some unique (well to me) behaviour for the first time.

So I was wondering if anyone could help.

I've also got 3 Peppered Corys in this same tank and these court in the
usual way, male tries nuzzling his mouth into the females mouth and then
tries a T-position whilst the female in on the substrate.
But this is very different.

I can't say I've read about this behaviour and I assumed that most Corys did
the same 'T-dance'.

Leopard Corys are quite timid and these hardly every come to the front of my
60L tank.

I've got 4x 2 year old Leopards in my 250L and I basically never see them at
the front or doing this.

Here is the 1 min movie (1MB) film I shot of them:

http://picasaweb.google.com/stuarthalli ... 8812001426


They swim midlevel around the tank and then swim next to each other moving their heads together almost back to back before breaking off and doing it again!
This lasted for 10 mins.

I've of course looked up Google on breeding this species and I've not yet came across any mention of this behaviour.

Anyone got any idea?

Maybe it is dominance behaivour?

They both look the same sex.But they're still young.


That is NOT a mirror image!

I've never seen corys doing that, but it sure looks like some type of behaviour to establish dominance.

My trilineatus do that as well. I've always assumed it was some kind of male sparring.

I've seen C.trilineatus males and Scleromystax barbatus juvenile females doing that. The S.barbatus will go as far as to tug on each other's barbels. I've found that it happens around feeding time. How about you?
Amanda

bronzefry wrote:I've found that it happens around feeding time. How about you?
Amanda

I've only seen it the once and I wasn't feeding them.

They were at it for quite a while (20mins roughly) which allowed me to get my camera out.

Odd, it's not been widely documented anywhere and it is (I assume) unusual behaviour for Corys.

Oh well, I'm glad I caught it on camera!

It may not be unsusual at all. We just may be getting lucky and looking at them at the right time.
Amanda

Interesting video. Do you have any females in the tank?

I was cleaning out my digital camera and found this:

Sorry for the poor quality. This is a male and female. Recently, I've only seen females going at it like this at feeding time. This photo was taken before I moved them into their new 55 gallon tank. This was in a 15 gallon tank.
Amanda

One of my pepper cory females frequents the front left corner of the tank and spends minutes looking straight up at her reflection on the surface of the water.