My Catfish Only Tank.

[Baccus]

Your various cats are looking nice and healthy, I have a school of 15 strebia in one of my tanks and one of my other tanks is dedicated to cory's shrimp and Borneo suckers.
I used to have my cory's on very smooth aquarium gravel and for cory's like peppered this wasn't an issue but I suspect the gravel (even though it was smooth no sharp bits anywhere) is what did in my poor little pandas. Now my cory's are on sand but I also have some smooth gravel mixed through the sand (probably roughly 75% sand and 25% gravel). I also use handfuls of gravel to anchor the live plants other wise the cory's never give them a chance for the roots to develop The gravel eventually gets covered by the sand thanks to the cory's snufflin around rearranging everything but the plants get a plenty of room for the roots to grow. I noticed that most of your cory's have nice healthy barbels with the possible exception of the large dark peppered, if it is the oldest cory in the tank that would explain its apparent lack of long healthy barbels. Please don't take this a critism, we really do just want the best possible environment for the fish. And trust me if at some point you do switch to sand then you will really see cory's having a ball submerging their faces up to their eyes in the sand.

 

[This Old Spouse]

One of my albinos in the sand ... he literally dove in!

 

[Blue Dragon]

Here's one of a different tank, I just thought it was a nice pic so I added it.

That picture is very cute

Yes, great photo! You may want to think about patenting it and maybe selling it to a big media company. I'm sure they could sell it on an you could get a commission.

 

[onidrase]

It takes about 4 dollars and an hour or two of your time to switch safely from gravel to sand. If it seems like those fish of yours are gonna be in that tank for a couple months or more, I'd make the switch. One of my friends had a cory cat that lived to be 9 years old. No other cories in the tank, nor sand substrate, just gravel. So I'd assume the gravel won't do any lethal harm to your cats. But, there is no need to say that the cory she had wasn't the happiest fish in the world. (she also didn't have a tank full of fish with a messy bioload though, that kinda concerns me, how much of that gets trapped in your gravel) but the switching will make the fish much happier.