My Pygmy corydoras have been breeding like crazy!! I need to a new tank to keep up with them. It’s been nonstop the past month or so. When mama goes to place her eggs she carries them with her back fins (it’s so cute!) and diligently looks for a good place (usually on the glass lmao). The males do this funny dance all around her and chase her around the tank. What is this behavior? Are they hyping her up?
Posted by wakeuptomorrow
5 Comments
They are waiting for her to release the eggs so they can fertilize them.
They are wanting to breed, they are waiting for her to lay the eggs
Can you imagine if male humans did this? I’d have to bite their heads off if I was an eggnant fish 😂
The female cory carries eggs around all the time, when she is ready to lay eggs the do that little shimmy dance up there and what’s happening is the female cory is literally drinking the sperm from the males when they do that little T pose thing. When she lays the egg she uses her pectoral fins to hold the egg in place and the sperm which has rapidly passed through her digestive system because evolution or something gets expelled from her vent and directly onto the eggs which she’s holding with the anal fins.
Kohda, M., Tanimura, M., Kikue-Nakamura, M. *et al.* Sperm drinking by female catfishes: a novel mode of insemination. *Environ Biol Fish* **42**, 1–6 (1995). [https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00002344](https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00002344)
sharing the research link because there’s a fairly persistent myth that the female is holding the sperm in her mouth and then spitting it onto the eggs but the reality is much stranger.
With pygmy cories there’s also a little bit of The “Entourage” Effect where a lot of males will swarm her and they’re all competing to do the t-pose and get the eggs fertilized. Larger species seem not to do that quite as much for reasons I don’t know and can’t find.
Corydoras fish breed in t-pose. The female “drinks” the milt, which travels through her digestive tract to fertilize eggs held in a pouch formed by her pelvic fins. Then female deposits fertilized eggs on leaves and cleaned surfaces