Albino Cory

[Fishtales]

Did a ph test of my water straight from the tap, it is 7.2

Also not sure if it will help, but decided to swap out most of my play sand for Unipac silver sand. Just need to wait for it to be delivered.

[mikeyw64]

you have to remeber that in the more general sense albinoism is actually a disease/congenital disorder so to my mind at least it doesn't surprise me that Albino variants (of any animal) are more prone to injury/disease

[Fishtales]

Thanks mikey, I didn't think of it like that. It would make sense as obviously my bronze are the same as the albino (aeneus) and as I said they have no issues at all. So my albino are more sensitive. Fortunately they seem very healthy otherwise. I hope adding the leaf litter will benefit them. It certainly won't do any harm. Not sure the new sand will help, but again it won't hurt. I originally picked the play sand as I thought it would be lovely and soft for them, but my thinking may have been wrong.

[fr499y]

I could be wrong, but the unipac silver sand is pretty much play sand.

[Fishtales]

So should I get a different unipac sand?

[fr499y]

@plankton am I right in thinking the silversand is almost the same stuff?

I've not had a problem with playsand ( don't go too deep with it ) and i use it in both my tanks. I do however like limpopo sand and river sand.

[Fishtales]

Thanks fr499y. I know loads of people who use and recommend play sand so was always happy with it. I know there are various others who don't like it as
well. Just trying to think of things to help the albino. It could do with being evened out more as it's quite deep in certain areas of my tank. I am going to cancel the silver sand as it seems a pointless replacement.

My indian almond leaves came today, so I will remove some of the excess sand for now and add some leaves and see how it goes.

[plankton]

I think silver sand is the good type (silica).
The Unipac certainly will be.

[mattindevon]

After doing some maintenance yesterday I noticed my two albino corys had barbel issues, and was surprised to come on here and find someone with almost the exact same circumstances. I also have two 'normal' bronze corys that are completely fine. But the albinos seem all of a sudden to have badly worn barbels, only one of the having a single healthy barbel. The substrate has been Unipac Tana sand since about a year ago and I've never noticed any problems at all until now, so the deterioration seems to have happened quite suddenly. The corys have been visibly happier digging around in the sand compared to the gravel it replaced, so I didn't anticipate ever having this problem. As my bronze cats are fine I too wonder if the albinos are more susceptible to damage - they have both had small (thankfully short-lived) fungal attacks to their finnage in the past but nothing more than that. When it happens I used a fungal treatment and it always does the trick. The nitrate reading was higher than 40ppm in my tank yesterday, so I did a 25% water change and will likely do a further clean at the weekend.

Just thought I'd post this to see if anyone had any further advice to what's been posted already.

[plankton]

What else is in the tank?
Any plastic, dragon or lava rock or slate?