Albinos occur in all animal species, including humans. Due to a mutation they lack the ability to form black pigments completely or partially. In nature, albinos are extremely rare, because they are too conspicuous and thus quickly become the victim of predators, in human care albinos occur sooner or later in all animal species. Since albinos are felt by many people as particularly desirable, one continues to breed them.
So it happened also with the Corydoras sp. aff. aeneus Neon Goldstripe, which is also known as CW 10 in the hobby. Originally this scientifically still undescribed species comes from Peru. Actually it is closer to C. melanotaenia than C. aeneus, but that need not be of interest here. In the albino form of this fish the ability to form yellow pigment is very pronounced. As a result, the famous neon gold stripe is always clearly visible. By the way of feeding you can control if you rather want them a little bit lighter – say: with whitish – body base color or rather with an orange-yellow body base color. A lot of food containing astaxanthin (e.g. Cyclops) gives orange-yellow coloration, food poor in astaxanthin leads to white fish. Both colorations can be reversed at any time by changing the feed. For the fish themselves this is meaningless.
For our customers: the animals have code 221092 on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply wholesale.
Text & photos: Frank Schäfer
