Corydoras breeder with planted tanks

[dw1305]

Hi all,
I've found an interesting video in the <"Practical Fishkeeping - Reader Visit>" section.

You have far more live plants in your tanks than I see in most cory breeders’ tanks. What’s the reason for that?

Initially I used a lot of Vallisneria torta for its long flowing leaves. It made my C. aeneus species easy to spawn as the plant flowed well in the turbulent water and they would lay eggs freely on it.

This sort of evolved into a belief that although we see videos and pictures of typical Corydoras habitats that are sandy or leaf littered, the Corydoras must be laying on plants or some form of plant matter or roots and there must be plants somewhere upstream in the river whether it be overhanging trees or plants within the rivers and streams.

This set me off on a planted fish room whether it be moss, Guppy grass (Najas), Cryptocoryne or Java fern, and I found more species of Corydoras laid on plants rather than on the glass or spawning mops when provided. Eggs are also easier to remove from plants due to plant cells having a coating on.

The growing plants were also removing nitrites, nitrates and carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. In effect they were conditioning the water, making the quality last longer.

Mark Allison is a very accomplished keeper & breeder of catfish and also a planted tank enthusiast.



cheers Darrel

 

[PARAGUAY]

I read the article and was taken by the many different Cory's he keeps and has kept and bred

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,

I read the article and was taken by the many different Cory's he keeps and has kept and bred

It is an amazing list.

One of the criticisms that the "Duckweed Index" (and plants more generally) have received on other forums is "if plants are so good for water quality why doesn't (insert name of famous fish breeder) use them?" It was same with <"matten filters">, a lot of people don't see how they can work, mainly because you can't use <"them as a syphon"> in the same way you could a canister filter.

When you have some-one, who has bred 128 species of Catfish, has tanks that look like this, it refutes a lot of those arguments:

......videos and pictures of typical Corydoras habitats that are sandy or leaf littered, the Corydoras must be laying on plants or some form of plant matter or roots and there must be plants somewhere upstream in the river whether it be overhanging trees or plants within the rivers and streams.

This set me off on a planted fish room whether it be moss, Guppy grass (Najas), Cryptocoryne or Java fern, and I found more species of Corydoras laid on plants rather than on the glass or spawning mops when provided. Eggs are also easier to remove from plants due to plant cells having a coating on.

The growing plants were also removing nitrites, nitrates and carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. In effect they were conditioning the water, making the quality last longer.............. The last step was to install ‘Matten’ filters (Hamburg Matten filters)............. I planned and constructed a closed air-ring and now filter changes aren’t a weekly issue as the matten can be cleaned every 4-6 months depending on a tank’s bioload, which Corydoras have a low volume of comparatively...........

cheer Darrel
.

 

[Oldguy]

I am not a fish breeder but my Corydoras sterbai regularly spawn on Cryptocoryne leaves in my display tank. Despite egg predation my group has gone up from eight to thirteen and down to nine or ten or so over the years. Difficult to count, seldom all together, often in small sub groups. Seldom find bodies of any fish, I think the L10A's are the clean up squad. Fish on the way out through old age etc are culled if possible.

 

[Majsa]

These tanks look really nice. I’ve only raised two batches of fry, CPD’s and Kubotais, and wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a bare tank. The CPD fry growed up in a tank without a substrate, but with floating plants and plants tied to decor. Lost many fry due to mistakes, but having plants in the tank was not one of them. I had more success with the Kubotais, now with dark substrate, moss and moss balls, anubias and floating pistia and riccia. I think the fry were hiding in the floating riccia at night and came out to open areas in the morning. I think you can you enjoy their behaviour better if they have the decor to display it.

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,
He is another Corydoras breeder with planted tanks, Mike King.



cheers Darrel

 

[Tim Harrison]

Looking at an old fish encyclopaedia from the 1970s, quite a few of Corydoras species are described as recently discovered and many more as nothing known about the reproductive behaviour.

I guess somewhere along the way one or two folk had success breeding these species in tanks without many plants and other folk just followed suit and it became the norm. Which makes sense if species discovered a long time since, and that breed readily in captivity, had also been bred that way in the past.

At the time not many aquarists were successful in keeping or growing aquatic plants so they wouldn't have been a prominent feature of many fish tanks anyway.
Also, many of the books that I've read from this era don't really have very much info on the actual habitat of these fish, mainly just a broad geographical location, so most folk wouldn't have known any different.

I also think this quote by Clive could also be very relevent to animals too, including fish such as Corys...

Yes, unfortunately, these are legends leftover from the 1990's. Whenever someone would find a plant in the wild it was automatically assumed that whatever conditions the plant was found in was, by default, the preferred conditions. It was never considered that the same plant could often be found in other, very different conditions and that it would adapt to those conditions. So people do crazy things to their tank parameters attempting to match some mythical standard.

 

[Guest]

Looks like an excellent setup

Substrate looks quite shallow for some of those crypts? Is he using root tabs, or?

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,

ubstrate looks quite shallow for some of those crypts? Is he using root tabs

You could ask him. My guess would be that he isn't.

cheers Darrel

 

[dean]

You have to remember that being able to keep plants alive is comparatively new to the hobby compared to breeding fish
The first tanks had normal incandescent house lights that also warmed the water
So plants were never that popular
Not forgetting there was only sand or gravel available as the substrate

Most people started out as fish collectors ( they buy small numbers of each species so that they could keep as many species as possible in their glass box)
Then the dedicated ones become fish keepers ( they keep fish in shoals and in the right water conditions for that species ) only then is tank decoration taking up a level to plants and natural decor and away from castles

The next level is to become a breeder and yes it’s usually a bare glass box with spawning mops made from wool and a cork for species that needed plants to lay there eggs on

Therefore fish were bred in bare tanks not by design but merely by necessity as there was no real alternative and this has just carried on as the norm


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