Labidochromis caeruleus

[simy696]

Apparently this a pic of the first eyellows imported into Australia from the 20k bred from wc parents in ponds in Tanganyika.   This is apparently how all eyellows look once they reach ten years of age.   Interested if any one has any thoughts or remembers anything of them?

[Ducksta]

I suspect being an old film conversion the color might be slightly darker than it should be. But that's basically how I think they should all look. Unfortunately due to the limited bloodlines available we end up with a lot of fish that will never look like that. 

 

[simy696]

wow interesting i dont think its anything like wild fish exiting the lakes and going to aquariums  troughout the world now. 

[simy696]

[Ducksta]

None of those fish are 10 years old.  You can tell from the lack of girth in the fish.

[Buccal]

You'd be very surprised to see what most Malawi fish look like past the age of 4-5 years.

Forehead, snout, tail body thickness and overall girth as already noted,,, because head changes and swells with age, (if healthy), it makes the eyes look positioned differently when they're not.

The first yellows in oz was a long time ago, and only a few old enough could remember...

Yellows are safe as houses,,, Doug could be for ever remembered in the fisho community for making effort to get the good gene yellows out to others oz wide,, excellent color, breed like mad, are less prone to E.yell waisting,,,,,, I have noticed though, no big deal, is that there is a very odd occasional 1 or 2 fry born with no black dorsal marking or close to none, other 99% are flawless.

I did some time back, get hold of these particular yellows from a person that said he bought his young breeders from Alex on here that has done that TB mini journal recently on here,,,,, these were good color, large fish genetics and very deep body with a squarish cross section,,, and these are what I believed the original look that fish come in, even young individuals were deep and broad.

Dougs line is line bred for quality improvement,,, as the Germans are well known for in their stock supply.

Wild isn't always necessarily better colors.

[simy696]

Larry Johnson  Stuart M Grant shipped me some Lions Cove "Electric Yellows'' in the spring of 2007, just before he passed away. They remained colored exactly as they were received from the lake until about 1 or 2 weeks before they died, at which point they started to show black dusting in the face and body (the only time this was ever observed). The last of that batch died off in 2015. They maintained their color and body size of wild fish and although they might have reached a slightly larger size than in the wild it wasn't much more,,,around 4-4 /2 inches for males. smile emoticon

 

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[RD.]

A friend of mine spent several months on Lake Malawi working with the late Stuart Grant. While there one of his responsibilities was feeding the fish each day, and helping set up display tanks in one of Stuarts fish room.  He brought back a group of WC yellow labs from Lion's Cove, and circulated numerous F1 fry. I bought the first batch that were produced. I should have some pics of the labs in Stuarts fish room somewhere, I'll post back with those photos if I can find them on my hard drive. 

As far as size, shape, and black marking. My friends WC male (which I suspect was few years old when collected) had a more stream line profile than shown in the initial post in this thread, (maxed out at approx. 3.5" total length) and also sported some black in and around the head region. (for a few years or more)

 

We are also now seeing imports of the L. caeruleus "Ruarwe" strain, which is more orange in color. Very nice indeed.

http://www.riftmaniacos.net/foro/mbunas/10868-labidochromis-caeruleus-ruarwe-orange

 

 

[Link2Hell]

Simy one of the things you have to take into context is that fish in captivity can vary to wild type due

to feeding higher nutrient material more often and giving an over conditioned look to the fish and that

people rarely keep a fish long enough to see the changes that develop with age and your first post

seems to show an alpha male with a few years under his belt

Once again here is a species that has geographic variances but when it initially came into the country we

were unaware of these and there was no collection point noted

what we can be thankful of is that the colourless grey imposters of this species have been bred out of the

local hobby, also during the time they have been here there was a breeding program to remove the black

from the fins, so choosing stock is important with these

[Buccal]

Never ever forget, the hard work and activities of aquarists devoting time into line breeding for selective quality,,, quality just doesn't come from fresh blood or wild caughts only.

googling pics for comparison then trying to extract meaning is a never ending string of fog.

Usually a country starts of with a small batch of one specie type, a few breeders have privlage of obtaining these,,,, these small batches that the country starts with have individual traits genetic wise, and these traits are forever expressed in the thousands generated from the initial batch,,, with mutations and variations occurring later down the track.

 

What other countries don't realize, is how tough OZ has it with our authorities and how hard we have to work to keep things going,,,,,,,, I'm fast growing a hatred for all Australian authorities,,,,, to me, Australia is like a mother or father telling how bad it is to smoke pot and all the bad things that happen and yet they have never tried it.

Basically a bunch of people governing something they have no idea about,,,, this is throttling the remaining bits of quality we have in Australia.

[RD.]

Quote

also during the time they have been here there was a breeding program to remove the black

from the fins

I recall an Aussie posting on I think cichlid-forum, a good decade or more back, maybe even 15+ now, that thought he had reinvented the wheel when he had yellow labs with no black in the fins showing up in his breeding. Like most labs of this nature, the fish were traced back to an AU LFS, where the fish had been sourced from a hobbyist, with no provenance. Where I come from that equates to mutts of unknown genetic make up. The only yellow labs on the market that I have seen in the past 20 years with no black in their fins, were hybrids. And I have seen plenty.

The fish shown in the link below (in the pics that I posted) were collected in Lions Cove.

 

 

The commentary below is from the person who collected them, after someone on a forum stated that this species was "rare".

 

I don't care if you've spent 100 years in the hobby and kept every single species from Malawi, but if you've never been diving there yourself, how can you be so sure that yellows are 'rare as heck'? Read all you want on the internet, but unless you've been there, rare could mean one per dive, only in deep water, they have large home ranges etc. etc. They aren't as common as many of the other fish in the lake, and I would say that they are rare b/c they have large ranges and live rather deep (I dove the Nakantangas - where Aul. stuartgranti 'Maleri' is from - a number of times but only saw one male, does that mean they're 'rare as heck' -no, I just wasn't diving as deep and over the open flats where they're found). Maybe if you actually read some of the material that RD has posted (from the web), you'd see that Ad stated that Stuart found it 'totally uneconomical' to catch them for export in the early days. With the recent interest in WC fish throughout the world, and the extremely high demand for WC yellow labs, it has only recently become economical enough to catch them.

As RD said, I was out with Stuart's divers on a collecting trip to Lion's Cove for yellow labs. It was about a three hour boat ride in an open boat from Nkhata Bay to Lion's Cove (along the way we stopped and caught the 'new' Aulonocara stuartgranti 'sanga'). The first full day of diving (two guys in the water for about 8 hours) we ended up with roughly 60 labs. These fish do live deeper (I never saw one above 40'), and also live alone (not really any large groups). From what I saw, it seems as it gets deeper the rocks get larger and almost turn into caves, making it extremely difficult to catch any fish. The fact that wild yellows are considerably smaller than the monstrosities I've seen around also makes them harder to catch (2" is a large female and 3" a large male). It was a lot of work to catch this many fish, and we probably scoured about a km of shoreline for them. The divers tied the barrel off for the night, and when we returned the next morning all the fish were gone; someone had either released them or taken them as an easy meal (probably the more likely). The next day we went farther up the coastline, but only managed to catch maybe 50.

Stuart had some yellows here and there throughout his compound (a couple fish in some of the ponds and the odd one in vats), but it was actually my persistence that pushed him to go to Lion's Cove for some new stock. Again, as RD said, the fish pictured were picked out b/c they had more an orange hue to them. I had some that were more yellow in either the tank beside or below (but liked the orange best personally). Almost all the fish from the tank pictured ended up getting shipped out a week or two later (they were after all all the best looking ones and this was a big client with big money).

These fish are not exported in huge number; I believe that the most I saw at one point was no more than 20 fish. And I'd bet there were no more than 100 shipped out the whole time I was there. So they still remain extremely rare in the hobby, and probably always will.

I hope this clears some things up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Buccal]

I'm glad you posted that RD, most people's impressions on how our fish are obtained are usually way out of whack,,,,, if using the term 'rare', then it must be explained in what way,,,, rare to me is just a bogus term to better sell,,,,,,,, just say not many in oz, or deminishing in the wild,,,,,,,,, a species simply may exist in very low numbers in the wild and is perfectly natural for that particular specie type.

[RD.]

Sorry, just fixed link, and added photos. I have no idea what I am doing on Win 10 and IE Edge, hope those pics load for everyone.

Those are what yellow labs from Lion's Cove look like.

[Buccal]

Some faintish vertical lines in them, and in the center pic towards top, the smaller yellow looks like may have slight pail yellow look to belly region....

Thats what I like about Dougs line, they are super solid vivid bright yellow due to selective breeding.

 

I remember at one stage ages ago we had yellows with yellow top half and white bottom half, everyone was calling them crap quality, but I was trying to explain they're not, they are a different location.

[simy696]

[simy696]

apparantly same fish but when younger.

[RD.]

Quote

Some faintish vertical lines in them, and in the center pic towards top, the smaller yellow looks like may have slight pail yellow look to belly region....

Yep, and on other side of Lion's Cove white belly morph is common. Funny how humans decide what's crap, and what isn't. And of course this is where selective line breeding comes into play.

[Buccal]

15 hours ago, simy696 said:

apparantly same fish but when younger.

If up the top left hand corner is a female yellow holding,, then these have the white on the underside in some of them.

Here I believe there were three distinct yellow variance and possibly a fourth,,,, and I'd say many just got jumbled and bred together.

[DFishkeeper]

4 hours ago, Buccal said:

If up the top left hand corner is a female yellow holding,, then these have the white on the underside in some of them.

Here I believe there were three distinct yellow variance and possibly a fourth,,,, and I'd say many just got jumbled and bred together.

I agree, I know I sought out fish from as many sources as I could in SE Qld and Sydney many years ago when I started selectively line breeding my strain. The overall quality of electric yellows available at that time was really poor.

Some of the ones with the brightest body colour over the years have had white bellies and even faint black body barring. I used some of those as breeders in the early times to improve the overall body colour in my strain and I still get some coming through, although I no longer use those as breeders.

Nowadays I am intentionally trying to breed black colour into the fins in females. Many  breeders select their breeding females quite small by going for fish with less colour in their ventral and anal fins, and I also used to do this until I realised I was unconsciously breeding out colour in those fins.

As I really like the colour contrast of the black fins I started growing my fish a bit bigger to 6.5cm or so before selecting my breeders so I could vent sex them accurately and select females with black in their anal and ventral fins.

 I have females starting to come through now that are almost indistinguishable from males without venting, having dark ventral and anal fins, an egg spot and an eye bar. Not all females as yet, but they are starting to come through. And of course I am now using these females as breeders. I have a couple of females here now that look exactly like the picture of the younger wild caught male posted above by simy696, just not quite as deep bodied.

Cheers, Doug

[z18turbo]

  Interesting read, I remember when I got back into fish a couple of years ago and got some good e yellows they lacked a really distinct white stripe along the top of the dorsal fin. I had some in a community tank I kept in the late nineties that came from Ravi and that was one of the features I really liked.

 

Cheers, Jarrod