Stocking/compatibility Mistake! Advice?

[IdahoAquariumKid]

I think I made a bit of a mistake in stocking my aquarium.
I have 5 female betta fish, 5 feeder guppies, 3 cory cats, a pleco, and 3 silver tips. I'm planning on taking the silver tips back to the petstore and getting more cory cats.

But can cory cats and plecos live together? Can different kinds of cory cats swim together in a group?

I'd also like to get a schooling fish that gets a long with bettas, cory cats, guppies, and a pleco.... any advice?

I have all but one of my silver tips caught in a let that's floating in the water kinda like a breeders trap until i can take them back to my lfs. I'll catch the last one later.

Thanks!
~IAK

 

[CezzaXV]

I'm not terribly knowledgeable on plecs, but I'll tell you what I've heard - there's nothing inherent in cories or plecs that would make them bad tankmates, but they're both bottom dwellers and you need to make sure they've all got enough room. You don't say what kind of plec you've got but some of them get very large.

Cories of different types will socialise, but nowhere near the level that cories of the same type would.

 

[OldMan47]

It is simple enough. If you have a dwarf variety of pleco, it will be fine with almost any other fish0. If you have a standard pleco, like a common sailfin for instance, it will get as big around as your arm and well over a foot long. One of the LFS near me has a display tank in their entry with a few common plecos in it. That lets people see just how big they can get and it gives them a chance to sell off those monsters to people who actually have room to keep them. Cories, on the other hand, are delightful in groups of at least 5 or 6. I prefer to have at least 10 of a species in a tank since the more there are the better they interact. Separate species of cories are no threat to each other but they really do not shoal together very well either. It is more like having 2 separate groups of 3 fish each, a bit substandard in terms of interactions.