Five to ten years from a two-inch catfish
A panda corydoras that is kept properly lives five to ten years in an aquarium, which makes it one of the longest commitments among small community fish. The panda is a little armoured catfish of about two inches, cream-bodied with a black mask through the eye, a black dorsal blotch and a black spot at the tail base. People buy them as cute bottom-cleaners, which undersells them twice over: they clean up very little, and they are not short-term fish. A panda bought for a child's first tank can still be snuffling around the sand when that child is choosing a second tank of their own, provided the floor of the tank and the feeding are right from the start.
The substrate question that decides everything
A corydoras eats by pushing its snout into the bottom and sifting, using the whisker-like barbels around its mouth to find food. On smooth sand that behaviour is safe and constant. On coarse or sharp gravel, the barbels erode — and a barbel-less panda cannot feed properly, sits exposed to infection through the worn mouth, and declines in a way keepers often misread as a mysterious wasting disease. This single choice explains most of the gap between pandas that die at two and pandas that reach ten. The second factor is company: pandas are social to their core, visibly looser and bolder in a group of six or more, and a lone panda in a big tank is a stressed fish whatever the substrate. The third is warmth — pandas prefer the cooler side of the tropical range, and years spent too warm run their lives faster.
Feeding the bottom on purpose
The other myth to retire is that pandas live on what falls. In a community tank, what falls is often nothing — mid-water fish intercept nearly everything — and a panda can slowly starve in a tank where it appears to forage all day. Feed them directly: sinking wafers or small pellets delivered after the main feed, plus frozen bloodworm or daphnia that reaches the floor, several times a week, ideally near lights-out when pandas are most active. Keep the water clean with regular changes, since a bottom fish lives in the layer where waste settles, and provide smooth stones and plant cover where the group can rest together.
Reading a panda's condition
Check barbels the way you would check a horse's hooves — full, even whiskers and a plump, rounded belly mean a panda is eating and thriving. Shortened or missing barbels, a hollow stomach, or a fish resting alone away from the group's loafing spot all call for action: inspect the substrate for sharpness, review whether food is truly reaching them, and test the water they live closest to. In a sound tank, ageing pandas slow down gracefully, their black patches staying crisp while the body fills out, and they keep joining the evening group shuffle across the sand for years. A panda that stops shuffling with its shoal, while the others remain busy, is the one to lift out gently and examine in a small container of tank water.
Starting a group that will last
At the shop, choose pandas from a tank with a smooth floor if you can, all with barbels intact, bellies gently convex, and the group piled companionably together rather than scattered and still. Buy the full group at once — pandas draw confidence from numbers from the first hour — and put them onto sand from day one rather than planning a substrate upgrade later that rarely happens. Then keep their paperwork like the long-term residents they are: arrival date, group size and additions over the years recorded in KinsLe's Pet Passport, so a panda slowing down at year eight reads as an old friend reaching its years, not as a sudden mystery.