pygmy corydoras are the cutest cory catfish ever but are they worth all the hype i mean i
don't know about you but I've only got room for a couple of ticks so let's talk about what it takes
to care for them how hard it is to breed them and whether or not i think they're a must-have fish
hi I'm Irene with Girl Talks Fish here with practical tips for busy fish keepers like you
and if you were following the saga of my worst experience with wild caught fish then you know
that i initially had some problems keeping these things alive so let's first talk about
their care requirements pygmy quarries are one of the smallest cory catfish there are so they
only get to like a little bit larger than an inch and therefore you could theoretically keep a small
group of them and maybe a five gallon aquarium like this one but since i was trying to breed them
i had a 10 gallon aquarium and i ended up with nine at first for a species only setup meaning
that was the only type of fish in there i even took out the amano shrimp so i was afraid they
might eat the eggs if they were any they are a schooling fish meaning they like to be in a group
of a lot of their own kind and they like to swim mid water they kind of hover around like miniature
hummingbirds which is really cool uh however they can be a little bit shy so if you have
that problem what i did in my case was i ended up getting four more pygmy quarries that i found at a
local fish store um so again the more the merrier the more they're more likely to come out as well
as add as much cover as possible so in my case i had this beautiful 10 gallon aquascape that i
planned out and i just let it kind of grow into a wild jungle and they seemed a lot happier from it
so if you want to see a list of all the plants and equipment i used you can see the video over here
based on Rachel O'Leary's 101 Best Freshwater Nano Species book uh she recommended keeping
them 72 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit so I kind of set my temperature controller to 74 to 78.
now where i ran into some trouble initially would be their water chemistry parameters so they do
come from South America's amazon river basin which is known for having acidic soft water so you can
imagine if you take a wild caught pygmy quarry that's used to 6.4 pH and then you plop it into
8.0 tap water like i did they're not gonna do so well so my recommendation would be to definitely
talk to your local fish store or to whatever breeder that you're getting them from and just
ask them like what is the pH what are the water parameters you keep them at how long have they
been living in these water parameters and are they doing well and then you'll have a lot more success
so in my case i ended up getting mine from an online breeder in Maryland aquatic life farm
and their conditions are pretty similar to mine so they ended up doing awesome now that i had
my happy and healthy herd of pygmy corys, time to condition them for breeding so something i didn't
realize which i should have known but they have annoyingly small mouths like they can't even eat
frozen blood worms or even frozen mini blood worms very well like they'll kind of suck the
juice out but very slowly not comfortably also while you may see your pygmy corys like dart up
to the surface to get a gulp of air they don't tend to feed from the surface of the water so
really you're aiming for something that's really tiny and is a sinking food so after a lot of
experimentation i finally have my list of their favorite foods which includes Rapashy gel food
is definitely one of my favorites just because it can it holds firm in the water and it sinks to the
bottom and they can kind of graze on it all day long they of course love live baby brine shrimp um
frozen daphnia and frozen cyclops are good as well as nano pellets like the really smaller ones that
are nearly like powder. Isaac from the Aquarium Co-Op forum told me that he conditioned his using
frozen tubifex worms and extreme sinking wafers so I'm definitely gonna have to try that next time
so now let's talk about breeding and just to be up front i am not an expert i actually only kept the
pygmy quarries in their breeding setup for about seven months before i ended up moving them to my
community tank so this was kind of this is kind of a description of my first attempts i tried
to induce breeding by doing things like you know large cooler water changes to simulate kind of the
rainy seasonal changes but since it was kind of winter time the temperatures in my tank were
pretty low already around 74 degrees Fahrenheit so that didn't work i also tried to kind of naturally
lower my pH by adding some catappa leaves every once in a while as well as doing minimal water
changes but my pH apparently stayed around 8.0 to 8.2 anyways when my pygmy fry were born they
basically did nothing for about four months and then all of a sudden November boom there were eggs
everywhere like i never saw them breeding but i knew that they were ready because there's this at
least one or two really large female quarries full of eggs and then this swarm of males constantly
hovering around her um as for where the eggs were laid i only got a few on the glass and for the
most part i found them kind of one-offs here and there like there'd be like one on a dwarf
sagittaria leaf or one caught in the roots of the water sprite i tried to rescue a few of the
eggs and raise them in a specimen container so i basically rolled them off of my finger or i used
a turkey baster to suck them up and then i added a few drops of methylene blue which was really
successful at not allowing i had a really high hatch rate they didn't fungus up so um originally
when they are first laid the eggs kind of looked like a translucent white and then gradually as
they mature they'll become kind of a translucent yellow tan but if you see any solid white eggs
most likely those are unfertilized duds that you should remove quickly so they won't fungus up
the other eggs unfortunately while i was good at hatching the eggs most of the fry ended up passing
away in the specimen container and i think it was because i just wasn't able to do as many manual
small water changes as they needed like i did one every single day but that just still wasn't enough
to keep the water pristine so next time around if i choose to raise the eggs myself i would probably
need something like an automatic water change fry rack kind of like what master breeder dean has the
most successful method for me honestly was colony breeding where you just let the adults do their
thing lay the eggs in the main tank and then let the fry hatch out with the adults and the reason
why i felt comfortable trying that is because i had heard that most of the pygmy corys probably
won't eat their own young and i found that to be pretty true like the adults would be just kind of
digging around the ground looking for food and if there was a fry in the way it would just dart off
and the adult wouldn't try to chase it which is pretty cool another thing i did was
minimal water changes like definitely no gravel vacuuming so that i could let the
mulm or that layer of brown fluffy dirt uh kind of grow and build up because there's a lot of good
microflora in there for the young fry to eat i definitely did notice that the fry would like
the adults dart up to the surface to get a gulp of air and then they would be so tired afterwards
they would kind of float down and not move and i think they were dead so maybe something i would
try next time would be to lower the water level so they don't have as far to swim it's a pretty cool
transformation because the babies when they're born start off with two black eyes and this big
black band behind their head and then with a couple days they look like they have four spots
or bands developing on them and then eventually those four spots turn into a whole mottled body
where their whole body is covered with you know different spots and dots and spots and dots
all over it probably to help them camouflage better and then the final stages those spots
start disappearing except for the ones around the middle forming that nice solid black line that
pygmy corridors are known for it's a really fast transformation because i would say within
a month basically the juveniles looked exactly like miniature adults and it was really hard to
tell them apart i fed mine a diet of at first live vinegar eels as well as powdered fry food
like Sera Micron and then as soon as they got big enough i was just like pumping them full of live
baby brine shrimp which makes them grow really fast and healthy so what is my final review well
pros they're absolutely adorable you know they might not have the most color but i love their
big black eyes they're little whiskers that look like kind of a mustache i like their behavior the
way they hover mid water flopping their wings or i mean fins like a hummingbird i mentioned before
and they even perch on plant leaves and branches like driftwood just like birds do
so i love birds by the way and one of the cutest things i ever did was sleep on these little tufts
of black beard algae on the driftwood which was so cute the cons are they're definitely a little
bit harder to breed and raise the fry compared to albino corridors that i did before and then also
like i mentioned before they're pretty shy you know if i ever wanted to get some footage of them
or look at them basically I'd have to sit there and be very very still for a pretty long time
and then one of them would like cautiously dart out and he'd see me and like dart away and so
it just it took a lot of time to properly enjoy them but do i think there and must have fish
absolutely yes although i may have not gotten a ton of babies out of them and i think it was an
absolutely fun breeding project just because it did take more patience and more hard work
than usual it wasn't that instant gratification i felt like it made the success all the more sweeter
plus now that I've moved them all to the 20 gallon display tank i still get to enjoy the fruits of
my labor whenever i see them resting on a giant anubius leaf flitting around kind of like little
butterflies in a forest clearing it's so cool if you are looking for some really cool breeding
projects make sure to check out this playlist over here that I've made for you otherwise take
time to enjoy your aquariums and I'll see you in the next video
hi I'm Irene with Girl Talks Fish
[laughter]
hold on okay