I’m planning on setting up a fish tank by the end of this year as a small side hustle, with the main fish being sterbai corydoras. I’ve done a ton of research on breeding/selling for profit, and have heard that diversifying what I can sell would be a good thing to do. With that being said, I’ve been looking into possible tankmates that could breed in the same 20g setup with the same water parameters, and I’m just looking for some advice.
From my research it seems that sterbais like temps from 73 to 78 and pH from 6 to 7.8. I’ve gone on PlanetCatfish and have seen people be successful with a wide range of pH but most breed them under slightly acidic conditions. Also I’ve read that the sterbs need some amount of water flow, but I’ve had trouble finding like a specific amount or a good filter that would be good for them. My first idea for tankmates were magenta mystery snails and gold dust mollies, but more research on the mollies told me that they’d need a bigger tank than my 20g plan, and also the LFS’s sell them dirt cheap already so i wouldn’t really make anything from them. For the mystery snails, it seems that the temp req has some overlap, but I’m getting differing opinions about pH, some websites saying 6.5-7.5, others saying 7.6 and up so I’m not sure. I also was thinking of, instead of the gold dust mollies, opting for something like black moscow guppies which would seem to work well with the requirements of sterbs (and be a bit more lucrative), but again i’ve seen conflicting reports of if the amount of flow would be an issue for them.
So I guess I’m reaching out to get other fishkeepers’ opinions on my idea; if those tankmates would/could thrive and reproduce in the same parameters as the sterbai; what a good option for a filter to provide enough flow for a 20g would be; and IF the tankmates I chose are poor choices, what tankmates WOULD be good choices? Tysm 😄
