Opthalmotilapia Species Mixed

[anchar]

Hi all,

Apart from the problem of cross breeding, has anyone tried to mix O. nasuta, O. ventralis and C. furcifer in a display only tank ? Assuming that breeding them is not a concern, would this work? There would be other fish to "distract' the O.'s, but would aggression be an issue ?

merjo

[Alvil]

Hi Merjo,

I think it would be absolute mayhem, unless they were in a very large tank, at least a 10x2.

I keep a small colony of wildcaught ventralis, i have kept cyps with them and they both have bred and got along, I have a pair of N. sexfascatus with them at the moment and when the male ventralis is trying to attract a female to his nest he bowls over anything that gets in his way.

The other concern would be their nest as they are fairly large.

And I would think that they would most probably crossbreed as the females woud be very similar.

I don't know about O furcifer, unles you mean C furcifer or foi

Alex

[Cichlids_au]

Hi Alex

Just a quick note to pass on some info that I gained during a chat I had with Ad Konnings in relation to nests. The latest thinking on this is to describe them as bowers as opposed to nests.

The reasoning behind this is that a nest is used to rear young and a bower is used to court females but young are not reared there.

This is certainly the case with Opthalmotilapia sp. they use their structures to attract the female but it is not used to rear the fry.

In some American sp. you see the fry reared in small pits that have been made in the substrate and they move them to other pits from time to time. This is believed (but not confirmed as yet) to be related to cleanliness, in this case the term nest would be appropriate.

[trofius]

Probably not a great wealth of knowledge on this but ....from what I have seen of my foai magara males which are just starting to colour up ~7-8cm. they are very territorial, mine doen't even have nests yet, just what i refer to as their feeing territories.. They are in a 6x18x18, 4 magara, 4 spilopterous, 6 leptos, btns and a stray leleupi and well, it is a very active tank!! lol but no real directed aggression, just a lot of chasing from territories. Actually the dominant fish in this tank is the big blue malasa male... The magara however ignore the other fish in there, even if they are sifting sand right underthem! they just focas on removing the other magara from the area.. So if the aggression is colour based then it may be ok, if it is shape based there could be dramas, I am assuming it will be abig tank anyways like 6x2x2 or bigger..

maybe if this is just a display it will be ok as there will be no females to argue over or to impress, so maybe no nests will be built either. I hope it is ok as i am thinking of adding two of my excess magara to a 8x2x2 display tank as well.