Corydora red blotch backstory

A bit of background story about why I wrote the article "Dealing with Red Blotch Disease In Corydoras and Other fish".

The truth is, at the time a couple of my corydoras were going through red blotch.

I still don't know the exact cause of where the infection came from, I can only assume it was the non-ideal substrate I had them on.

You see, Corydoras eat in a very interesting manner. They use their whiskers (barbells) to dig through sand for food. They then take a mouthful of sand and eject the leftover sand out of their gills while retaining the food.

These barbells are extremely important to their feeding and can easily be damaged on sharp or rough or heavy substrates. Coupled with that, The gravel I had them on (Fluval) was large, light, and porous.

This made it easy for mechanical injury to happen to the corydoras barbells as well as the scraping of their bellies while they swam about.

I think that was the main reason the infection took hold.

Unfortunately, I lost 1 fish before I noticed, and rushed to save the other 5.

So after losing 1 fish from this (I haven't lost any since then from red blotch), I immediately stopped using that kind of substrate for my corydoras and decided to switch to a more appropriate sand substrate.

After switching substrate, I experienced the most prolific growth in my corydoras that I had ever seen before. It was like night and day!

And while this might seem as though it's just me in this experience, a friend of mine (who also breeds corydoras) told me that after he switched to sand his fish really took off too.

Immediately after I noticed red blotch on one or two of my cories, I started treating them with sea salt and it worked wonderfully well at getting rid of the red blotch disease.

Not all the cories had it, But I did make sure to give them all a 20 minute round in the salt solution just in case.

Now, I do have some sad news. One of the cories had a bad reaction to the salt mixture, we're not entirely sure why as it's pretty much the same one everyone else got.

We put it down to his particular subspecies.

Long story short, he tried to jump out immediately and went belly up!

BUT DON'T WORRY!! We moved him back into the aquarium asap and he recovered instantly.

He might have just been a drama queen, Or the stress of netting him got too much to bear. Either way, he was ok.

The moral of the story is, Salt baths do work on some fish for bacteria infections, Just make sure to get the measurements right and always double-check to make sure your fish isn't super sensitive to salts.

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