The green gold catfish (''Corydoras melanotaenia'') is a

tropical The tropics are the regions of Earth surrounding the Equator. They are defined in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere at S. The tropics are also referred to ...

freshwater

fish Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of ...

belonging to the Corydoradinae subfamily of the family

Callichthyidae Callichthyidae is a family of catfishes (order Siluriformes), called armored catfishes due to the two rows of bony plates (or scutes) along the lengths of their bodies. It contains some of the most popular freshwater aquarium fish, such as many ...

. It originates in inland waters in

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

, and is found in the

Meta River The Meta River is a major left tributary of the Orinoco River in eastern Colombia and southern Venezuela, South America. The Meta originates in the Eastern Ranges of the Andes and flows through the Meta Department, Colombia as the confluence of ...

basin in Colombia. The fish grows up to 2.3 in (5.8 cm) long. It lives in a

climate in water with a 6.0–8.0 pH, a water hardness of 2–25 dGH, and a temperature range of 73–77 °F (23–25 °C). It feeds on

worm Worms are many different distantly related bilateral animals that typically have a long cylindrical tube-like body, no limbs, and no eyes (though not always). Worms vary in size from microscopic to over in length for marine polychaete wo ...

s, benthic

crustacean Crustaceans (Crustacea, ) form a large, diverse arthropod taxon which includes such animals as decapods, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean group can ...

insect Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three ...

s, and

plant Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclu ...

matter. It lays eggs in dense vegetation and adults do not guard the eggs. In captivity, the eggs are attached to the broad leaves of plants; the eggs hatch after five days. Usually, one spawning session produces about 150–180 eggs. The green gold catfish is of commercial importance in the aquarium trade industry.

References

External links

Photos at Fishbase

Planetcatfish: Corydoras melanotaenia
Corydoras Freshwater fish of Colombia Fishkeeping Fish described in 1912 {{callichthyidae-stub

See also

References

External links