Opening up a tank

A pet store in the City agreed to take the remaining Macropodus, leaving me with an empty tank. So what do I do with it?

There are a few options. One option is to try to turn it into a proper display tank. It's the most visible tank in the house, so it might make sense to try to make it as pretty as possible. But what I really want is a breeding tank, a place to try my hand at getting corys to breed. The question is - which ones do I try?

The biggest group, the six Corydoras trilineatus, are too young and don't seem to be thinking about breeding. The pandas are good candidates, as are the Cw008s, since I appear to have a male and a female, and they seem interested in one-another. I don't know what sort of conditions Cw008 would want for breeding, but it's worth trying the standard cory setup - regular water changes with water a little cooler than the tank. It's probably more important to give them a rich diet. The biggest challenge is probably to catch them without trashing the entire tank.

There's no guarantee that I'll be able to get them to breed, and if I do, if I'll be able to raise the fry. But I don't want to make the same mistake I made with the Macropodus - that left me with over 60 fry to find homes for. Since Cw008 (assuming that I have the ID correct) is less common, I'm guessing that there's an appeal in rarity. On the other hand, there's obvious demand for pandas - things with mass appeal are likely to be easy to get rid of.