Hi! Sure, thank you! And no problem!
I'd really love to live somewhere with soft water straight from the tap too! That's the dream for most fishkeepers I think, since the vast majority of fish we keep are soft water fish, and the options for those of us stuck with hard water are so much more limited. We're pretty much stuck with a choice of cichlids, livebearers or rainbowfish - and not much else! It's also fairly easy to increase hardness in water, for those living in soft water who want hard, but not easy to decrease hardness, meaning either installing and expensive (and wasteful) RO system, or using rainwater which has it's own risks and potential downfalls.
What fish do you keep, and what's your hardness?
I think I remember seeing that it's even harder in London?
I use a mix of tap and rain water for my small, soft water tank to lower the GH to an acceptable level, but had to get a second water butt to have enough rainwater, and only really enough to keep a 15g for my pygmy cories and otos.
This tank with the cories though is straight tap water, which here has a GH of 253ppm. Most cories need softer water, but I inherited two bronzes and looked them up, and they can tolerate hardness up to 268ppm,
according to Seriously Fish, which is a source I trust! There are a few cory species out there that can live in harder water. Not as many, but some, if you look for them! A cory loving friend of mine delved into research and helped compile a list for me of some harder water cories, including Corydoras Sterbai, who can live in a range of 1 to 15°H. Sorry, I can't remember/find the chart to convert that, but I know that mine is within that range since I checked before getting Sterbai cories.
The black Venzualan's; there's some confusion and lack of clarification when it comes to their origins and official species classification.
@Byron , you wouldn't happen to have any info from Ian Fuller about what he thinks of these fish, and whether they're truly a colour variation line bred version of C.aeneus, would you?
@Fish4dawin At the time I got the black Venezuelan, I knew they weren't a wild species exactly, that they're not from Venezuela, but were produced by a European breeder relatively recently. Everything I'd read said they're merely a colour morph mutation of C.aeneus, the bronze cory, so I had no worries about getting them, since they'd need the same conditions as the bronzes I already have. Some are now saying they're C.schultzei, but Seriously Fish says this is synonymous with C.aeneus, so it's very confusing!
SF is still classifying these black Venezuelans as a type of C.aeneus, with the same care requirements though, until anything official changes, so I feel okay with keeping them at the same hardness and in the same conditions as my bronzes.
More info on this from Seriously Fish below;
"C. schultzei has been routinely misapplied to a melanistic strain of aquarium
C. aeneus which exhibits a blackish colour pattern, is often traded as ‘C. schultzei black’ and said to be exported from Venezuela.
The melanistic fish were in fact first recorded in Germany in the early 1990s with a handful of dark-coloured fry appearing in a batch captive-bred from a form of
C. aeneus.
These were line-bred to fix the unusual trait and subsequently appeared in the trade.
The fry possess orangish fins as do those of a form of
C. aeneus exported from the
llanos of Colombia and Venezuela which is able to darken its colouration when stressed and known as ‘C. venezuelanus black’ (see below for more about this form), so this is where the confusion may have started.
As a result the line-bred fish now tend to be traded under both of these names, despite neither being correct, and the appearance of wild ‘C. venezuelanus black’ remains somewhat vague with more than one species possibly confused under the name.
The name
C. schultzei has also been applied to a fish usually exported from Peru and sometimes referred to as ‘gold flash’ or ‘Peru gold-stripe’ cory (not to be confused with the ‘gold laser’, CW010, or ‘gold stripe’, CW014/C023, forms).
This does appear distinct from other
C. aeneus-type fish and may well prove to be so, but because the type locality of
C. schultzei is not known, the original description has proven unobtainable thus far, and it remains invalid in an official sense, we’ve chosen to retain the name in synonymy with
C. aeneus for the time being.
C. venezuelanus is another name that has not been considered scientifically valid for a number of years but is widely used in aquarium literature.
As with
C. schultzei this appears to have occurred in the absence of any detailed rediagnosis and it’s unclear which characters should be used to define the species.
The name may well be applicable to a
Corydoras sp. inhabiting the states of Miranda, Aragua and Carabobo in northern Venezuela, although it’s more often used in reference to ‘C. venezuelanus black’.
However in the absence of official confirmation
C. venezuelanus is also retained as a synonym of
C. aeneus here."
unfortunately, might need to start with RO since I really want corydoras and diamond rummynoses. If I can't lower it I will go for dwarf neon rainbowfish, have had them before but only in a group of 6, so might go up to 8 or 10 perhaps. I went to a LFS 30 mins ago and they had Sterbai and Bronze corydoras, plus albino but the sterbai were £12.99 for ONE. The bronzes were a better deal with 3 for £8.50 but I hesitated on picking them up because I had never been there before and I wasn't sure if the fish were ok so will get them from a more reliable place I guess.
