black venezuelius
There continues to be two sides on this issue. One is that the Venezuelius Black is a transplanted Schultzi that someone made the way through the jungle of the lower LLomas region with some of the human engineered Black Schultzi and turned them loose in those tributaries. Another is, the Black Venezuelius is an actual, God made, black Cory. Since Germans worked for years to selectively breed the black genes from a Schultzi into more and more generations, there would of course be a very good monetary reason to denounce the existence of a naturally ocurring black in the wild. Accepting that someone would pay a fortune for enough Schultzi to plant a good colony in a few of the Venezuelan tributaries is a bit hard for me to accept. I personally keep Black Venezuelius and have compared them to my friend's Black Schultzi. I found some slight differences such as less grey in the belly areas, more color in the dorsal and caudal fins, and such. I also put a few of mine on white sand for a month. They did fade a little, but to a dark green with a slight stripe down the sides, almost resembling a natural standard Venezuelius Corydoras that you would find in the higher elevations in that same region of Venezuela. I am not an expert. I can not type that I know for certain that the two are completely different "strains", if you will. But I have convinced myself that they are. Experts will continue to argue about this until the value, or price they are sold for, drops significantly enough to have the two sides finally come to an agreement on it.
