Some years ago the Corydoras adolphi catfish hit the aquarium scene with a large furor...and even today the price of the "Adolphi" commands quite some respect. About a year and a half ago the TBAS had as it's guest speaker the son of the gentleman the Aldophi catfish is named for......... Adolph Schwartz Jr. and Adolph Schwartz Sr. of course is the gentleman for whom the nifty little cory is named. As cory's go it seems to be very typical. Smallish...with the males being smaller and more slender than the females but I got very "tuned-in to the C. adolphi the more the Adolph Jr. told us about the little cat. Well at the end of the talk there were some C. adolphi that were brought from the wild by Adolph Jr. and it cost me a pretty penny to end up with what turned out to be 8-10 females! Boy did a TBAS member come to my aid. John Peterson, who breeds catfish realized I didn't have any males and graciously gave me 2-3 males for 2-3 of my females. What a great deal! Not a month or so after the introduction of John's males they spawned! The water was all wrong......hardness and pH....and there were only just a few eggs but I tried to take them out but alas nothing happened.....they all fungused.

I was more than a little excited because in all of the years that I have been keeping and breeding fish it was the first catfish I had spawned and it was the Adolphi! For the next few months I kept thinking that I better get to those Adolphi's....it would be neat to get some fry from them, but time went buy and "stuff" happened and I never got the water to the point that they liked it. I had put in a little bit of RO water but not enough to make much of a change.....I thought. Another night....another TBAS board meeting at my house.....and Mike Lobello is hollering....."...theye're spawning again!!!" and sure enough 3-4-5 of us watched them spawn a second time. This time I was ready however! I took each of the ohhhh 12-15 sticky eggs out with my fingers and put them in a small "covered butter dish" with some tank water and Bingo-Bango in several days there were say 10 little catfish fry wiggling in the bottom of the dish. All went well with the small cats, and they got to looking like real catfish at about 3-4 weeks of age as they were scurrying around the 2 gallon plastic tank they were in and then I had an operation...and broke BOTH feet.....well to put it shortly......it was a month or so before I was in shape to deal with my fish and the little cats were gone.........Ok, we start over again!

Well, it has been almost a year and I finally got around to treating the cats like they should be treated and they spawned again and it was on another TBAS BOD meeting at my house and a bunch of people again got to watch again! I got about 30 eggs and after picking them out I put some acriflavine in the water and checked them each day for fungusing eggs and maybe 5-6-7 fungused.......but there seemed to be a problem.....it was the fourth day and not a sign of hatching....no fungus and they were developing but no hatches........fifth day and none hatched.....oh man what do I do.......I remembered what Jim Cormier said he had done with some kind of catfish....he had picked the hard egg cases apart and the fry swam away. Well......nothing to loose. I got out the wife's tweezers and away I went. I very carefully broke open the egg casing on all of the eggs and by goodness there were 7 that made it. Most all of the eggs had developed with fully developed fry in them but they had died in the egg casing.....it was really sad!.......but the good news was that I had 7 little Adolphis that seemed to be fine. Well after 3-4 days of feeding microworms to them I now had 5 left.......and to this day there are 5 left and here are the 6 week old pictures. My guess is that the stories about some fungus inhibitors are true....they harden the eggs casing to the point that the fry can't get out. I guess the fungus inhibitors should be changed after the first day or two.....what do you folks think?.......John Peterson is right...........catfish are fun!!