PlanetCatfish.com

Hi everyone, I'm Anna!
I wanted to share a little story that still makes me smile and also pick your brains a bit.
A few weeks ago, I was doing a routine cleaning in my community tank when I suddenly noticed one of my Corydoras (a lovely little C. sterbai) acting very strangely. At first, I thought something was wrong; he kept darting to the surface, circling, and nudging a piece of driftwood. When I looked closer, I realized he had discovered a tiny clutch of eggs I hadn’t noticed before!
Turns out, two of my Cories had been spawning without me even realizing it. It was such a sweet surprise! I never expected breeding behavior in a tank with no special setup. I’ve since spotted a couple of tiny fry, still hiding most of the time, but very much alive and well.
Have any of you had unexpected breeding or other unusual catfish behavior in your tanks?

Hi annabaggins,

Stay in the hobby long enough and it's bound to happen. Always fun.

Cheers, Eric

Going back to 2001 I had started my first tank, a 45 gal. I had it overfiltered with an under gravel filter and and an Emperor 400. I was also pretty oignorant re fish back then. The tank had and assortment of fish which included swordtails and the now renamed Hoplisoma panda.

As time went by I discovered that one could also run an undergravel filter in a reverse mode. Instead of air power causing water to be sucked down hrough the substrate into the space under the plate and then through the uplift tubes back to a few inches below the surface. If one wanted to run an RUGF (Reverse Under gravel Filter) it was done using a powerhead which ran in reverse as well, So it sucked in water via the output tube down to the bottom and then up through the gravel. So, I decided I would do this

I had the tank on a angle iron stand which only supports the frame rather than the entire bottom of a tank. This meant i could look up from underneath the tank with a flash light and look to see what was under the plate. When setting the tank up and researching UGFs, I learned that, over time, muck can build up under the plate and it would need to be siphoned out.

I had put a pre-filter sponge over the powerhead intake. I had ti jury rig this. As a result it was not easy to detach the pre-filter to rinse it every week. I would unplug and then lift the entire powerhead and lift it out of the uplift tube (now a down flow tube) and then remove the sponge. Some times doing thus would cause ht uplift tube to come out of the plate. Normally. I would reattach it right away but sometime I did not fo do until I had cleaned thr songes and rattached it to the powerhead.

And then the time came to take a flashlight and look under the tank to check out what had accumulated under the place. To my absolute amazement what I found were several small swords and pandas swimming around. They either found their way in when I forget to reattach the uplift right away or by swimming down the uplift tube from the top while I was cleaning the foam etc.

There was no way I could leave the fish there. So, despite the fact that I had migrated from fake to live plants, I uprooted them all, I then caught all the fish in the tank and put them into buckets. Next the decor and gravel came out to more buckets and then after remove the undergravel plate. I caught the swords and pandas. That was the end of under gravel use. I replace it with and AquaClear 200 (now called a 50).

That was a long story, sorry. But the pic below was taken when I pulled an ATI sponge filter out of one of two 10 gal. tanks used for growing out tank variety long fin bristlenose offspring to get them to 1.5 inch before selling them. Sometimes, the few that carried the LF gene but did not have LFs got bigger because the LF were the craze back then and regular fins were harder to re-home. I pulled an ATI sponge to a bucket with water so pull off the foam with the top half of the skeleton inside leaving the weight and the bottom half behind.