possible for different corys to breed?

[reinhart]

i have a brown catfish, corydoras sterbai. I went to a store to find it a mate and the only thing i saw was catfish in different colors, like the albino one. Can i put in an albino one and expect mating? someone at the fish store said that my corydoras needs a tankmate or else it will get very lonely. is that true?

 

[SirMinion]

Interesting question. I think it's likely that it's possible, if only with artificial insemination, but hybridisation is frowned upon in the hobby so I doubt it's been tried much outside a lab.

Your albino cory is a mutation of a standard coloured species, so if you can work out which one it is, and get others of the same species regardless of whether it's coloured or albino, then there's no reason why they shouldn't breed.

And yes it's true, cories must be kept in groups of at least three, and preferably the same species.

 

[tear-scar]

sterbai is not brown. C. Sterbai is a spotted cory with bright orange pectoral and ventral fins. They are also semi-rare.

If your catfish is brown, it's probably the much more common c. aenus, or bronze cory. Albino cories are mostly c. aenus, so if you wanted to breed it's possible . . . though usually people try to keep color strains true.

A sterbai cory is a fish completely different from c. aenus, and it will not breed with bronze or albino c. aenus. There is an albino sterbai as well, but it EXTREMELY rare and expensive . . . we're talking double digit prices here.

<edit> The cory in my banner is one of my c. sterbai, just as a reference.