As I mentioned in a previous entry, one of my cory cats laid eggs about a month ago. I removed one leaf from the amazon sword plant on which some 44 eggs had been attached, and put it into a separate “quarantine” tank. A few days later 41 of the eggs hatched (a surprisingly high rate of fertility) and over the past few weeks I’ve been raising the fry, of which around 30 have survived to date (a surprisingly high survival rate), and seem to be healthy and growing fairly quickly, most being a bit over a centimetre in length by now.

As for the eggs left in the aquarium where they were laid, I had assumed that the ever-foraging bala sharks had eaten almost all of them, and that any remaining fry that managed to hatch would not survive due to predation and/or lack of suitable food—I’ve been feeding the fry powder-like fish food appropriate to their body size. So it came as a complete surprise to me when watching the aquarium yesterday I noticed a small juvenile cory cat swimming about foraging for food (as cory cats do on an almost continual basis).

It’s a mystery to me how it managed not only to survive, but also to grow to well over twice the size of the fry in my dedicated hatching tank. Whereas the latter don’t yet resemble fully-formed adults, lacking the distinctive scales of adult cory cats, the juvenile cat I spotted basically resembles a smaller-sized adult fish. I guess—to quote from Jurassic Park—”life found a way”.