Osteogaster schultzei "Very Black"

Solid black - no bronze showing through, dark brown fins instead of the usual olive. This isn't a wild colour form. It's an aquarium strain: a German hobbyist first produced it around 1989 out of the gold-shoulder schultzei-type cory, and breeders in the Czech Republic took it from there. Every black schultzei in the hobby traces back through that line, this one included. Runs larger than most corys in the shop - two and a half to three inches at full size.

Worth knowing before buying this fish under this name anywhere else: schultzei is a genuine taxonomic mess. Holly described it in 1940, the type specimens were destroyed in WWII, and for the next fifty-odd years it sat as a synonym of Corydoras aeneus with no material left to argue the point either way. Tencatt and colleagues made a case in 2023 that it holds up as its own species, and the 2024 genus revision filed it under the resurrected genus Osteogaster, Lineage 7, pending a proper resolution. Current status: valid but unsettled. Also worth knowing - plenty of vendors sell this exact fish as "Corydoras venezuelanus black." That's a different species from a different country. This one is Peruvian by origin and has no Venezuelan lineage at all, whatever the label says.

This breeding group has been selected hard for depth of black. Not wild-caught, not flipped from an importer.