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A few days ago i noticed some eggs on the filter, and on the glass in my tank. At first i was thinking - Are these snail eggs? Then i saw my female corydoras aeneus swimming round with eggs clutched under her fins. I didn't do ANYTHING to encourage breeding. Anyway, the eggs are going to hatch either tomorrow or Wednesday, and i was wandering....
1) Is it likely that the babies will get eaten by my Siamese Fighting Fish?
2) Will the babies eat food particles in the tank or should i crush some tablets up or something?
3) How old do the fish have to be (if i have any survivors) before i can move them?
There is NO WAY i can keep the fish, and there is NO WAY i can get another tank, so i'm going to have to see if my LFS or friends will take them.
Anyway - i'm so pleased my fish were happy enough to breed! Even if i didn't want them to

Congratulations!

You can get a soluable solution to feed the babies. Just add it to the tank and they will "eat" when they breathe...more or less.

Maybe organize a safe place in the tank for them as well...

Good Luck

Patrick




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Just one more tank........

Buy one of those breeding nets and scrape the eggs from the glass carefully and place in there with some gravel on the bottom of the net to help protect them from getting eaten . also place an airstone under to prevent them getting fungus as this happens easily.
you can buy liquid food for fry and you just have to squirt a small amount in to feed as they grow you can feed them brine shrimp pellets and flake.

as they grow you wil get an idea when it is safe them to place them in the tank usually when they are around 1-1.5cm they are pretty good at looking after themselves around this size.

enjoy them there are soo cute! when my albinos first started breeding the babies were so cute! im just warning you that they wont stop breeding!

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Truth doesn't always win friends but it influences them

If it's happy, Corydoras aeneus needs precious little necouragement to breed. A water change will usually stimulate this, especially if the water change results in a slight temperature drop in the aquarium. This is because Corydoras catfishes have evolved to spawn at the onset of the rainy season in the wild, and the rainy season usually signals itself to the catfishes by the sudden addition of cooler and more oxygenated water to their home rivers and pools when the rain falls. Remember that in Peru, for example, annual rainfall is of the order of three hundred inches per year - and 90% or more of that falls within the six months of the rainy season. So, a sudden influx of cooler and more oxygenated water will act as a spawning trigger for almost all Corydoras catfishes.

As for saving your babies, well, I posted lots of instructions for saving Corydoras eggs in this thread. Hunt down my post, then when you've found it (it shouldn't be hard, it's the longest post in there by a BIG margin!) copy and paste the instructions in there to a Notepad file or a Word document. Save to your hard drive for future reference. If you wish, print off the instructions so that you have them to hand while you're engaged in midwifery duty.

These instructions will work for ALL Corydoras - Peppers, Bronze, Pandas (I did this with my Pandas and ended up with a nice crop of babies to raise when I transferred the eggs to a separate aquarium).

Oh, in the case of Bronze Corys, you should only try and save 30-50 eggs for your first attempt at raising them, because you won't be able to raise a larger number unless you have a nice large nursery to grow them up in. Bronze Cory females can lay up to 400 eggs when they spawn, so unless you have a spare 75 gallon sitting around empty and waiting to be pressed into service, you won't be able to raise 400 Cory babies to saleable size, and even if you could, you'd then have the fun of trying to sell them ... you'd probably flood the market with a single batch!

For feeding, there are two options. One is to raise an infusoria culture. This is sometimes described as something of a black art, but isn't really - all you need is vegetable matter rotting in a jar of water, and within 72 hours, hey presto, lots of microscopic life forms start appearing in the water ready to act as fish food. You only need a small amount of vegetable matter in your jar to achieve this, and if you drop in some snails, their droppings will accelerate the process of creating little rotifers and other baby fish food organisms. Hunt around the forums for more instructions on this. The second option is to obtain Liquifry egglayer baby fish food. This stuff works well, and I've used it to raise Panda babies with no problems at all.

Take special note, by the way, of the measures in that other thread I use to keep fungus at bay. There's a proprietary anti-fungal additive made by Tetra, specifically designed to protect fish eggs - it's called FungiStop, and again I've used it with my Pandas. Works well.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Thanks everyone for advice. Nearly all the eggs have hatched but i can't see any baby fish
Mind you, my tetras were hanging around two clumps, and my siamese fighting fish round the other. There's still a couple of eggs left - but something tells me i wasn't lucky this time. How big are they? I heard they're see through so there might be some i haven't spotted. I'll keep you posted.

As an indication, Panda Cory fry are 4mm long when hatched. If they have any fine leaved plants or Java Moss clumps to hide in, they'll head for these as fast as their little fins can take them. They'll then hide in there during the daytime and feed at night when the other fishes are inactive. If you don't have Java Moss, then try and obtain some by hook or by crook, because you'll discover that clumps of Java Moss make superb safe havens for tiny fry, especially Corydoras fry. The downside of using Java Moss is that you won't actually SEE your fry until they've grown a bit, but it'll keep them quite safe.

This photo from my Webshots album will give you a VERY good idea what Corydoras fry look like. If you ever get to see them side on, and if you take note of the colour of the fry at this stage, you'll see that they're PERFECTLY camouflaged against gravel (which means you'll only see them when they move!), then one of the fascinating things you'll discover about these fry is that they have luxuriant barbels right from the moment they hatch - they look just SO cute when you see them in a small container where you can actually see the barbels, because they look as if they have real walrus moustaches because the barbels are oversized in relation to the tiny fish when they're newly hatched!

You can expect most Corydoras fry to look like this, though some of them show interesting markings at an early age (my Pandas fall into this category). Your Bronne Corys will probably produce fry that start off unpatterned, but watch them as they grow, because some Corydoras species can deliver some amazing surprised colour scheme wise, changing on a more or less continual basis for the first 10 to 12 weeks of life until they acquire their final adult colouration. The most extreme example of this is Corydoras rabauti, which looks TOTALLY different from the adult fish in juvenile colouration, so much so that the fishes were originally named as two different species!

How you raise Corydoras fry depends to a certain extent upon personal preference. If you want ease of maintenance, then they can be raised for the first 4 weeks or so in a bare aquarium with just a sponge filter providing the biological filtration - that way, you get to see them, you're able to count them, and you see problems appearing very quickly among the fry. Alternatively, you could go for the 'natural' nursery method which I use, which I have to tell you is a good deal more difficult to maintain because the little guys are hidden away amongst the plants and other aquascaping features, which makes gravel vac operations somewhat interesting to put it mildly. But, in my case, I believe that if the fry are raised in a natural-looking nursery with live plants and bogwood to hide amongst, then they are happier babies, and it's worth the extra work. Your choice of course!

Bronze Cory fry will probably be a good deal less delicate than my Panda fry, so you might be able to get away with a 'normal' water change regime instead of having to trickle the water in as I do with Pandas for the first 21 days (for Pandas, the first 21 days is the critical period during which losses will be horrendous if they're not well looked after). Even so, it's wise to exercise more care and attention with the fry during the first 21 days of life even with a species such as the Bronze Cory, which has been domesticated and aquarium bred for years, because you'll have a higher survival rate and the fishes will be much better able to survive subsequent transfers to other aquaria once they're big enough to have developed adult finnnage. Note that ALL fish fry start off life with a body plan that consists of little more than a sliver of flesh with paired fins - the unpaired fins develop later from a mantle of tissue at the rear end called the 'finfold', and whose shape is highly reminiscent of a newly hatched tadpole. The unpaired fins don't differentiate fully from the finfold for some time (different species vary somewhat here), and in some fishes, this process can take as long as 6 weeks. In the case of my Pandas, finfold differentiation is usually complete at 4 weeks, but again, individuals can differ.

So, next items on your shopping list should be:

• Tetra FungiStop or equivalent antifungal agent for egg protection

• Java Moss for the fry to hide in

• Liquifry egglayer fry food

• Possibly a sponge filter for a 10 gallon nursery aquarium if you're going to set one up for the first 4-6 weeks of life

• Brine Shrimp culture kit for when the babies are old enough to eat newly hatched Brine Shrimp

Again, if reading this all in one go is too much, copy and paste to Notepad/Word, save to your hard drive, and peruse at leisure.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002