The Cory´s blog

In this blog I will write about my wonderful experience breeding corys. This was my first serious atempt at breending this little guys, and surprisingly, my success rate was very high, since more than 90% of the eggs laid hatched, and of those fry, 95% or more, survived for over one and a half months now… That´s amazing !

I will start by explaining how I set up the aquarium where the parents were placed.

I used a 40 liters tank, with sand in the sustrate and a bunch of plants (vallisneria americana). I used also a foam filter and a heater, keeping the temperature at 26 centigrades (celsius). The pH was 6.5 / 6.7.   I let the tank alone tu mature for about 3 weeks. Then I placed the female cory and two males with her. She was at that time, very gravid already.

Once I placed the 3 corys in the tank, I left them there for a week without disturbances and feeding them with artemias, spirulina and flake food.

Later that week, I placed some ice cubes to the water and did a 25% change of it.

After I placed the ice in the tank, the corys started to act very excited chasing each other all around the aquarium. A few hours later, they started spawning.

After dancing around with the males, the female would push one of the males in the midle section of the body, forming the famous “T” postion. she would do this sometimes while swiming, but most times in the button of the tank. In doing this, the female stimulates the male to produce a quantity of sperm. She then swallows the sperm, wich travels very rapidly trough her digestive system and exits near the anal fins, where she is holding some eggs that in that moment get fertilized.  Then the female takes off looking for a good spot to place the eggs she is carrying with the anal fins.

The female places 3 to 5 eggs in a spot she finds suitable, and then goes down again, followed closely by the males.

You have to be ready, because when the corys finish spawning, they will start eating the eggs rigth away.

When I saw the female and the males starting to eat the eggs, I removed the parents and placed them in other aquarium.

That concluded the first stage of my cory breeding project.

Next, I used my vortex diatom filter to clean the water perfectly. I leved runing for 10 hours.

The next day I began putting some methylene blue into  the water to figth fungus. 10 drops daily.

Next step is to wait. In my case it was 5 days.  On the fifth day I looked for little corys, but found this instead:

I was lucky enough to see most of them hatching. First the tip of the tail appears out of the egg, then, very rapidly the rest of the tail comes out of the egg, then the little cory shakes anf gets loose off the egg and swims out. Marvelous…

For two days I didn´t feed them at all. Later when they had consumed the yolk sack I started giving them liquid baby food. About 10 drops 3 times a day.  I was able to see only 3 or 4 of them, the rest of the corys were hidden.

10 days later, I could only see about 6-7 corys and started to believe they were the only ones left. I continued feeding them liquid food 3 times a day.

At day 14 I started giving them some very fine powder food. I was able to see about 20 corys coming out of the plants and stones.

At the 25th day I could see over 30 corys looking for food in the tank. They now resamble their parent a lot. I feed them twice a day with fine powder food.

At 45 days of age, the corys look amazing ! A did a fast counting and find out they were around 135 corys !  Out of 150 eggs, it´s just amazing.  In fact, in all this days I saw just 2 dead corys. Some of the smallest.  I belive it´s a very very good success rate, don´t you think ?

Take a look at the corys at 45 days of age:

I will post some more photos when they get to be 2 moths old. I´m editing a video of the entire process of breeding and will upload it soon.  If you have any comments or questions, please let me know.

UPDATE

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One of my albino cory paleatus started spawning, take a look:

After the female finished laying eggs, the other corys started eating them. And since I had no place to move the corys, none of the eggs survived.

I´ll post the videos of the spawning of the firts corys as soon I can.

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UPDATE:  The corydora mom spawned again this morning and I now have another another 100+ eggs !

I´m uploading a video rigth now.  21/4/2009.  Hopefully it will be online in a few hours.