Aquarist Atlas
Aquarist Atlas · armoured catfish

Corydoras

The cory cats — small, armoured, bottom-dwelling catfishes of the family Callichthyidae, spread across the fresh waters of South America and a fixture of the aquarium hobby. This section is the start of a Corydoras atlas built to the same standard as the cichlid pages: researched, cited species accounts with no Wikipedia and no invented facts. It will grow species by species.

© Adobe Stock

Species are grouped by their current genus. A 2024 revision (Dias, Tencatt et al.) split the old catch-all genus Corydoras into several distinct lineages — Hoplisoma, Brochis, Osteogaster, Gastrodermus and others — so a fish the hobby still calls Corydoras may now carry a different scientific name.

Each account keeps the familiar Corydoras heading and explains its current placement under the revised classification.

A shoal of cory cats swimming together
Cory cats are shoaling fish — they’re calmest kept in groups of six or more.
Two metallic cory cats close-up on dark gravel, showing their armoured flanks and downturned mouths
Built for the bottom: armoured flanks, downturned mouth, sensory barbels for sifting sand.
A single cory catfish against a black background, showing a dark mask through the eye, an iridescent shoulder patch, bony flank armour and a pair of sensory barbels at the mouth
The whole toolkit in one portrait — overlapping bony plates, an iridescent shoulder, barbels for probing sand, and the dark eye-mask that recurs across many Corydoras.

Photos © Adobe Stock

Species

214 described species · 50 code-only forms of 264

Aspidoras · 23

Aspidoras — small inland-Brazil genus

Brochis · 43

Brochis — long-snout & reticulate group

Corydoras · 44

Corydoras s.s. — the type lineage

Gastrodermus · 15

Gastrodermus — the dwarf elegans group

Hoplisoma · 121

Hoplisoma — the largest resurrected lineage

Osteogaster · 10

Osteogaster — the aeneus/bronze group

Scleromystax · 8

Scleromystax — bristle-cheeked SE-Brazil genus

What’s new

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