The are some members who have asked me how I breed my cories, so I thought I would start a thread so that everyone can (possibly) benefit from my experiences. I must just stress that this is MY way, and I am sure that there are many just as good or better ways to do it. This is just the method that has worked for me. I have a 'breeding group' of cories consisting of about 3 females and four males. They are in a very lightly planted 3 foot tank. My substrate is pool filter sand. I have a heater set at about 25 degrees and for filtration I have an AquaClear 200 HOB filter. I primarily feed them on Tetra Tabimin and 2 twice a week I also feed live microworms. About once a month I also give them frozen bloodworm. I know, not much variety, but I am still learning. I perform 25% water changes once a week. The new water that I add is straight out of the tap and has been dechlorinated and been left to stand for about 10min. This water is normally a few degrees lower than the tank water, and I think this is one of the keys why my cories spawn so readily. I am lucky in the sense that I have never had to do anything specific to get them to spawn. They just started doing it spontaneously. Funnily enough, it is almost always on a Sunday morning. I normally do my water changes on either on a Saturday evening or Sunday morning. That same evening, I fill an ice cream tub with about 1L of water from the tank in which the eggs are. I then take a razor blade and carefully remove the eggs (which are normally deposited on the glass) and place them in the filled ice cream tub. I float this tub in any of my tanks, and add an air stone. I used to add Methylene Blue to the water as well, to help stop the eggs fungising. I have recently stopped doing this and still get the same hatching rates as far as I can tell. Every day for the next 3 days, I do a 50% of the tub water with water from the tank in which the eggs were laid. I am not sure if it makes any difference that I take it from the tank in which the eggs were laid. I suppose any mature water will do. I also try and remove any eggs that I can see have fungised(?). On about the third day, the eggs will start hatching. Once a day, I will suck up all old egg casings, etc. with a small pipette (spelling?). I will still continue doing my 50% water changes. On about day 3 after hatching (they should be free swimming by now), I start feeding. I use Prof Dirks #1 granules (more of a fine powder really) and microworms. As young fry, I feed them microworms once a day, buy I know that mircroworms are quite 'rich' and you should not feed them daily to juvenile or adult fish. I try to feed them tiny amounts every few hours if I am at home. I don't worry too much about overfeeding, as I am siphoning the bottom of the container daily as well as doing 50 % water changes. About a week after they have hatched I put them in a bare bottom tank with just a heater and a mature sponge filter. Once in the tank, I reduce the water changes to 10% per day, making sure to siphon out ANY debris from the bottom of the tank. I continue like this for another week or two and then start giving them pieces of Tabimin. From there I start alternating the feedings between Tabimin and Prof Dirk's Granules. I also give them microworms every second day. As they get bigger, I will also start with frozen blood worms once a week. If they spawn and I know that I don't have enough tank space to rear the fry, I just leave the eggs alone and don't even remove them from the glass. They eventually get eaten. This is the process that has worked for me. Following this process, from the last spawning, I only lost 3 fry from the time they hatched up until now. I hope this helps others who are trying to breed their cories. I now want to try with the more difficult cories and see if this process works with them. Let me know if you need anymore information. Cheers Darryn
Hi.. I used to breed Bronze cories on a comunity tank, and the fry was doing very very good.. I usually got about 30 to 40 every month to the shop, after two months from first spawn. I did pretty much what you did, up to the point of taking the eggs out. I would say that if you want to breed cories and keep the eggs on the tank, provide lots of food, have a external filter, and lots of plants and small rocks on the bottom, above the sand.. something like 5cm river pebles does the job.. Why? Because when the fry get out of the eggs they will fall down and cannot swim for a while, so they hide on the crevaces, allowing them to escape the parents. After a while, cories will breed as much as guppies.
My friends bronze cories laid eggs on a amazon leaf in his community tank. He spotted early enough before other fish got to it. He called me up all exited and asked me what to do? I told him to empty 50% water out of his 30cm barebottom tank wish was unoccupied at the time and fill it up with water from his community tank. Cut the leaf of the plant and move it in a cotainer whilest in water to the small tank. both tanks temp was at about 26 the eggs hatched and fry fell to the ground and could hardly be seen. Raised all of them succesfully Fed powder for first 2 weeks then crushed up flakes and tetra prima bits. Since then he set up a 60cm heavaly planted Amazons only tank with about 7 corries in. And they seem to breed fine and often. always laying on the hardleaves of the amazons. Then he just moves it again. Unfortunitly he went over to trying to breed bigger fish. Space is limited hehe