Welp, life in my tank just never gets boring. LOL

I recently purchased a half dozen corydoras elegans to add to my few remaining corydoras sterbai. All but one were DOA, so I QT'd the one little guy with my new group of cardinal tetras and hoped for the best.

He survived and grew - yay! He's almost 2" long now and his markings are quite pretty. BUT, this guy is a real oddball.

I'd read that they often like to hang around at mid tank level, but not this little thing. For the first month in the big tank I rarely ever saw him. Every few days I'd say "Oh well, guess he didn't make it after all." only to have him suddenly scoot out from under the driftwood and then scoot back again.

For the last 2 weeks he's been hanging out with my sterbai's so I assumed that he finally felt large enough to join the little group. He's still a LOT smaller than they are, but at least he was hanging, right?

And then I lost him again. He wasn't with the corys and I couldn't find him anywhere in the tank for over a week.

So yesterday I tore down the tank in order to put in new white sand. I removed all the driftwood and plants temporarily (they'll go back in in a few days, they just need a good cleaning and trimming first).

Didn't find any fish carcasses and wondered where on earth that elegans had gone.

As I was refilling the tank (discus were out of the tank the whole time, so only the cards and corys were in there) I suddenly realized that one of my cards was swimming oddly - in short bursts rather than long fluid, graceful sweeps around the tank.

Sure enough, it's the elegans! He's been swimming with them for the last 24 hours and doesn't seem to have any intention of returning to the cory group. The only time he heads to the bottom is when I put in his favorite pellet food. LOL