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astrodermus hastatus is a very small “mid-water shoaling” cory in that it doesn't spend as much time on the substrate as other Cory's do, and seems to prefer to sit on the leaves of aquarium plants rather than sitting on the bottom.

Gastrodermus hastatus

As mentioned you should house these dwarf Cory's with each other in a shoal with about about 1 dozen being a nice number in a species tank, as these small Corydoras will not do well in a community tank with robust tankmates unless they are housed with small unagressive Characins.

This is the smallest Cory to date and the females usually are a bit bigger than the males. They are similar to Gastrodermus pygmaes, another dwarf Cory, but the black diamond shape in the caudal peduncle and into the tail of hastatus, with the top and bottom of this diamond ringed with white, tells them apart as pygmaes sports a black band that runs the full length of the body, ending just short of the tail end, and ending in a slightly broader band.

Gastrodermus pygmaeus

You can see in the above picture of Gastrodermus pygmaeus, the differences in the black mid-lateral line between it and our factsheet subject this month, Gastrodermus hastatus.

Dwarf Corydoras

Corydoras australe, Corydoras hastatus

Corydoradinae

South America: Brazil, Amazonas Villa Bella= Parintins (02º38'S, 56º45'W).

Male: 2.5cm. (1ins ) Female: 3.0cm (1¼ins)

23-27°C (73-81°F)

D 1/7; A 2/5-6; 22 bony scutes in the upper lateral series, 20 in the lower.

This is akin to most of this genus, very peaceful, and would be best housed with small to medium tankmates such as Tetras, Rasboras and Danios or in a species tank due to their small size.

I successfully bred this species in 1988 and from my notes I had them set-up in a 16” x 8” x 8” tank furnished with a thin layer of sand, Java Moss and a sponge filter. I had only the one pair and they spawned after a cool water change, laying their eggs on the glass sides and in the Java Moss. They also laid eggs on a small piece of bogwood that I had put in the tank after a club member had spawned them this way and had advised me about the bogwood when I had difficulty in trying to spawn them. Whether this was a coincidence or not I do not know, but it worked. I took the eggs away and into a small container, they hatched 6 days later and I started feeding with Liquifry for egglayers for 3 days, then on to brine shrimp.

Small pieces of food are needed for this cory such as brine shrimp, crushed flake food, tablets, freezed dry blocks of tubifex stuck on the sides of the tank and any such food that will fit in to their tiny mouth's.

Gastrodermus: The lining membrane of the alimentary tract of an invertebrate, used especially when the germ-layer origin is obscure.
hastatus: Spear-shaped, (referring to the spot).

Alexandrou, Markos & Taylor, Martin (2011). Evolution, ecology and taxonomy of the Corydoradinae revisited.
Angelica C Dias, Luiz F C Tencatt, Fabio F Roxo, Gabriel de Souza da Costa Silva, Sérgio A Santos, Marcelo R Britto, Martin I Taylor, Claudio Oliveira, Phylogenomic analyses in the complex Neotropical subfamily Corydoradinae (Siluriformes: Callichthyidae) with a new classification based on morphological and molecular data, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2024;, zlae053.
Fuller, I.A.M. & Evers, H-G: 2005 Identifying Corydoradinae Catfish 384 p.
Lambourne, Derek. Corydoras Catfish, An Aquarists Handbook.
Seuss, Werner; Corydoras The most popular catfishes of South America. Dähne Verlag, Ettlingen.
Sterba's Freshwater fishes of the World Vol.1 1973.

Photo Credits

Top image: © Ian Fuller @  
Bottom image: © Danny Blundell