PlanetCatfish.com

A quick question...

It's often stated that many (all) cories do better grouped in numbers of same species 3-4-5-6
I have had 2 individual fish of cories of many species (and in 2 cases 1 or a rarer ..hard to procure species) live 8-10 years plus when mixed in a tank with several other cory species.
They seem quite happy to school with like minded Cory genus...Is this not legit..and if so why the long life..I'm making no attempt at breeding . Orange lasers under this housing reached 3" and lived 11 years...

is is absolutely true that they are a very social fish. i have a tank where i put all the fish i get (but might not want)because someone is going out of the hobby, cuttind down on tanks and there are at least 5 different species of cories in there.they are always together in different mixes, there seems to be no / very little aggession against non con specifics. i find the more the merrier, at some point there were enough that they stopped all hiding and are out almost all the time.

In the wild many species of cory shoal together. This Nature article describes a set of mimicry rings in cories which all involve similarly-patterned species shoaling together.

Hi,

well yes, corys of different species also shoal together in the nature, I guess with mimicry pairs this holds true even more. But I don't think that the TS was refering to mimicry pairs/trios.

However, you can also observe in nature that Corydoras do have a clear preference for their own kind. Most often you have in the rivers one dominant Corydoras species and certainly you can watch single specimen of others joining those. But you can also quite often observe that small groups of other corys are swimming in a school on their own without mixing much.

So yes, Corydoras of a different kind are better than no tank mates at all, but better is to have a decent group of the same species. I would not expect a big influence on the age that they will reach though. I'm quite sure that corys can live longer than 10 years even if there are kept alone but I would never recommend it...

Cheers,