I have had a clearout of all my fish except for my 18 x Sterbai Cory. I am wanting to get a decent breeding yank going so my questions are:
- How many Sterbais should I have?
- How many plants do they need?
- Any other tips?
Thanks,
Chris
More sterbai's the better 
Plants are good for egg laying,especially broad leaf plants etc...
Whats your temp? i know sterb's prefer higher temps,but drop it down to around 24 degrees,daily feeding of bloodworm and cold water changes and await their response
If they look active/lots of chasing around,do a w/c
This isn't strictly true, i had a prolific breeding group of sterbai (6 or 7) and then i decided to up the numbers slowly. As the group slowly got bigger so did the frequency of the spawns. Eventually i had a group of 40 and no spawns at all i whittled the groups back down in to group of 6-7 and each group began to spawn again.
Ive had this now happen with a couple of groups of different species, whereas the bigger the groups the less frequency the spawns happened... weather or not the cory's had a big enough group to feel they didn't need to breed any longer i dont know. I guess that would have to be done on a long and closely monitored period but for me i found the larger the group the less frequent the breeding became.
Are your group still spawning Chris, is it still the group you had off me?..... if so the original 7 i had are amongst that group and spawned far more for me than when i had that group as a whole... dont get me wrong.. the that particular group still spawned often but no where near as much as when that group was smaller.
There is no need to drop the temp to 24, the daily water changes do that anyways. Im not sure if Harlequins meant drop the water temp permanently and then do water changes dropping it even more but that would bring it much further down than i would advise for sterbai even for breeding.
Ive dropped my sterbai tank down by upto 11 degrees with water changes, average was about 6-8 and had great success.... there is no need to drop the constant temp down if your dropping the water daily with changes.
Plants were never an issue, they used to lay on anything that was available, the leaves just helped hide a few extra eggs so less was eaten... with this group/my group.... the laid that many you really didn't need to bother worrying about a few losses lol.
Good Luck with them anyways mate
I'll have to wait for my 8 to grow instead :>
