PlanetCatfish.com

Hey all,

I've had a lot of success raising Sterbai cories without much attention. I started with about five and nearly quadrupled the population in a heavily planted aquarium. Unfortunately, my adults have become very unproductive. Aside from laying eggs almost on a bi-monthly basis, they just hide all day. Have they grown old and lazy? I barely see them eat. Only their offspring are seen wandering the tank.

Is this normal behaviour? Thanks

Hi ZeroChalk,
You are seeing normal behavior. If you want to breed them set up a 10 or 15 gallon tank with a sponge filter and air stone bare bottom style. No plants. Plants with introduce snails that will eat the Cory eggs. Fill the tank 1/2 full of their home tank water. Begin feeding a steady diet of live worms. Blackworms are best but white and grindal worms are also good. Keep live worms available to them at all times. Set the temperature to 80dF. after a week or 10 days at most top off the tank with dechlorinated COLD water.
Leave lights on low or off. They should start laying hundreds of eggs. After 4 days take out the breeders because the first eggs layed will begin hatching on the 4th or 5th day and continue until the last laid eggs hatch.
You should have a good supply of microworms handy to feed the larvae that become free swimming within 48 hours after hatching. They have a yolk sack that gets them through the 1st 48 hours. You will have different sizes of fry due to the staggered egg laying but as long as you have a constant supply of microworms the size differences won't matter. After 2 months they will all be pretty much the same size.
You will have to spread them out because there will be too many fry to raise them all in the spawning tank.
Repeat the first steps if they don't spawn for some reason.
Now is the time to do this. They seem to spawn from beginning of Fall and finish about the beginning of Spring.
I cannot breed them in the summer. I have around 1000 from a spawning group 14 C. sterbai and they show no signs of stopping. The keys are cool water changes, dim light and all the worms they can eat. My breeders are one year old and still growing.

Larry, I have a group of 5 adults coming in tomorrow! Are these guys easy to sex or should I toss all 5 into the BB tank and let them duke it out? Are there any alternatives to the micro worms for the fry? I guess I ned to get on aquabid and start buying some different worm cultures.

Hi Liz,
They are "sort of easy" to sex. Males are slimmer and tend to have a more pointed dorsal fin. When I recently tried to separate the sexes I still ended up with at least a couple males wwith the females and they continued to spawn. So I finally decided to leave them all together and just keep them well fed.
I have tried bbbs, frozen bbs, and decapsulated brine shrimp eggs but none of these foods work as well as microworms, Microworms can stay alive on the bottom for 12 hours. So they stay where they are needed and provide live small food continuously for the larvae. I also tried frozen cyclopleeze but all these other foods are more useful after the larvae are a couple weeks older.
I recommend http://www.LFSCULTURES.com for your source of microworms. They are specialists and easy to do business with. They raise over 35 different organisms for sale.
I have decided that it is easier to just keep my breeders together and keep them stuffed at all times with blackworms,
Larry

As always, good advice. Thanks again. I'll post if I get any action from these guys.

thanks!

We will flood our regions with C. sterbai.
ZeroChalk, please fill out your location on your profile when you can. It is a pc rule and it's nice to know where we are amongst us catfish keepers.
Thanks,
Larry