Friday 23 January 2009

a more peaceful cichlid setup

i've had cichlids in my fishtank at home now for about 2 months and have learnt a lot. with the little experience i have had with cichlids and what i had read, i thought i could easily change my fishtank from a semi-aggressive community setup to one with similar inhabitants but also with the addition of a couple of species of cichlid. well i was a bit wrong...

my initial interest with american cichlids was not only that they were bigger, more colourful and seemingly much more intelligent. it was their behaviour during breeding that interested me along with the parental care of their young. i really want to witness a breeding pair of cichlids looking after their own fry.

the first thing i did about 3 weeks ago was to take the now obviously smaller ( harassed ) male blue acara back to the pet shop in timperly. the shop still had most of the rainbow cichlids from my previous visit. so i sat in front of their fishtank for about a good 10/15 minutes watching them and trying to discern which were female. the reason for me spending such a long time was because it was almost impossible! they all seemed to look so similar, but i had read that it was particularly tricky to tell the sexes apart with these fish. i picked 2 and took them home.

during the next week i watched the fish quite closely whenever i was able to. it didn't take long for it to dawn on me that this setup was wrong. i had 6 yo-yo loaches and 12 barbs zipping all over the fishtank, creating havoc at feeding time and generally not being conducive to the central american setup i now intended to keep.

i took all 12 barbs and 6 yo-yo loaches back to my still all time favourite shopoasis aquarium in salford and part exchanged them for 8 captive bredcorydoras sterbai. oasis gave me 2/3 of their sale price for the returned fish and i ended up paying £62 (corys) - £38 (barbs+yo-yos) = £24.

3 weeks later and all is well. i am still not certain if any of the rainbow cichlids are female but they never do each other any harm, they just occasionally chase each other out of the way. the remaining acara seems happy enough and never chases the rainbows, if anything the rainbow with red eyes seems to be the owner of the fishtank now. the acara generally swims all over the fishtank pleasing himself. and finally, the corys are fantastic. having 8 of them and watching them form small groups or one big group, especially at feeding time is great as they busily rummage around looking for food and adventure!. :-)




as you can see, the cichlids like the camera. :-)

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looking good :)

Stuart
Sea Fishing and Walking in the UK

Anonymous said...

wanna exchange page links? i have an aquarium blog too ...still working on it. it's aquariablog.com

let me know. nice site

thanks

Anonymous said...

How are they doing? any sign of little ones yet?

Bryan said...

excellent topic you have written here with a good video. thanks a lot for providing such an information.

neha said...


cichlid aquariums


wow... find it interesting... hope it'll be beneficial for me and my friends...

RedClownfish Aquarium Supply said...

Glad you got it all sorted out! It's always great to have an aquarium store that helps out a lot. Great looking aquarium!

AquariumArch said...

Cichilids are great fish to keep, interesting article

Warren said...

Convicts are easy and fun, and exhibit fabulous parental care.

You can see mine here, where I wrote about Brood Care:

http://nospisciculi.blogspot.com/2010/05/brood-care-my-convict-cichlids.html

Warren,
from Canada.
Eh.

The Aquarist Guide said...

Great tank and beautiful cichlids! Keep up the good work!

Share your blog on my directory, I'm sure others would like it!

http://www.aquaristguide.com

J-joker said...

Thanks! That was educational,but I noticed this post was last year. Any way, I still learned something about those fishes that you have and I hope you still have them today. The video was cool.

Jean said...

Although this was kind of a late post but this is helpful for the fish hobbyists.

More to learn about freshwater aquarium setup

Chris said...

Cichlids have to be my favorite aquarium fish. South Americans are my favorite. I've never tried an African cichlid tank.

StatsProfessor said...

You could use a background in your tank.

Looks pretty good though, miss my cichlids.

waste transfer stations said...

One thing to consider is that a bigger aquarium requires less maintenance. Small aquariums are much harder to keep the water balance correct, are easy to overcrowd and rotting food or vegetation can have an immediate affect on the health of the fish.