Articles

Cherry Red Shrimp as a Cory Egg Hatching Aid

We are always looking for new ways to successfully hatch eggs. In the fall of 2008 I found one more. An Aquabid.com user named Neoncory was advertising corydoras eggs of various kinds for sale. He would ship however many eggs he had on a given day, so I ordered eggs from Cory. davidsandsi, C. duplicareus, C. sterbai and C. panda. When they arrived we opened the package to see several bags of cory eggs, some of which had already started to hatch and a surprise. In each of the bags there was a single Cherry Red shrimp. I poured a couple of these into a 10 gallon tank and watched as the shrimp pick up eggs and clean them, rotating them and nibbling at anything they found. I contacted Neoncory and found that he had been experimenting with this method in his own tanks for quite some time and found the shrimp to be excellent egg cleaners.

In experiments with some Orange Laser Cory eggs I found that an individual shrimp in a plastic container and air bubbler did best with no more than 20-25 eggs. Beyond that I don't think one shrimp can keep up with the egg cleaning duties. Also, keeping the air bubbler to a minimum seems to be more agreeable with the shrimp. Once the eggs hatch the shrimp pay no attention to the fry and I was not able to see any loss of fry over the first few days when I left shrimp in the hatching containers. I typically remove the shrimp back to their own tanks once the cory fry are free swimming.

This method is preferable to the addition of chemicals and even easier than the other relatively new method with alder cones, which need to be changed daily.

Reprinted with permission. This article first appeared in "Fincinnati" the magazine of the Greater Cincinnati Aquarium Society, then in PVAS’s Delta Tale, Vol 35 # 4.