New tank: substrate &stocking ?

[robbyno22]

I'm starting a new tank for my son's room. It is a 20 gallon regular, not sure what filter yet, but it will be fully cycled before I add fish. I had a lot of trouble finding tiger endlers in my area, and a couple of my local lfs's have said that they would buy them from me if I bred them. I've heard that endlers are less likely to eat their fry than other live bearers. Is that true?
I would like to get a pygmy breed of corydora as well. Will they eat the fry?

Since we want corydoras, we were thinking about using a sand substrate, but I'm a little bit concerned about the ammonia pockets I've heard sand can release. Is there anything I can do to eliminate this problem? Is there anything else I should know about sand substrate?

The tank will be planted with easy/low light plants.
Thanks in advance!

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[Jev12]

No the Corrys shouldn't eat the fry and you can put some Malaysian trumpet snails in the tank to make sure the sand doesn't have those air pockets...just don't over feed or they could easily overpopulate

 

[henningc]

I concur with the above. You can find all the tiger endlers you want on Aquabid. If you P.M. me I'll give you a few names of good breeders. The endlers should not eat their own fry as long as they are not starving to death. Even the endler / guppy crosses like tigers seem to exhibit that trait.

Pigmy corys are cool fish and very unlike other corys. They are not stuck on the bottom and love plants to sit on. They will eat their own eggs, but if you have a well planted and thought out tank you may get a few survivers. Just an FYI all of the fish will do much better with a little live food weekly. Daphnia or new hatch baby brine shrimp are the best. I would suggest micro worms, but I don't know how well that works with sand.

 

[tomtom14]

I agree with it all wish I had jev12 6 months ago. As I changed to sand with corries but the ammonia pockets where too big of a problem. So I changed to a very fine substrate that was big enough not to have the ammonia pockets but small enough for the corries since then I have had no problems. Wish I got the snails as getting the sand out of my tank was not fun at all.