New tank, want to do Africans, but need help

Ok, so I finally got rid of the old 20g and bought a brand new 46 bowfront. Emperor 400 for filtration.


Water stats are

PH: 8.0
KH: 250
GH: 280+ (off the chart)

I think that africans should like this pretty well.

I put a bunch of rocks in the tank for them to hide in. Here's what they look like (don't worry about the cloudiness, I washed the rocks but they still put off a fair amount of dust. Will give the filter a few days to work on it.



I'm planning to fishless cycle it, but I'm really stumped on where to get my fish from. I have read the recipes and such, but all I can get from the LFS are "assorted african cichlids". They can order specific breeds for me, but not specific sex, so I can't get trios.

Any advice? I can't identify them myself, and even if I could, the "assorted" tanks seem to be mostly males.

I live in the SF bay area, so there are plenty of fish stores around, but I haven't found one with a decent selection of africans. I'rm really stumped here so any advice would be appreciated.

For reference, I have been keeping freshwater tanks for years, but never tried africans.

Anybody know of a good LFS for Africans in the Bay area? Or an online place that ships to CA that you have had good luck with?

Thanks for the replies. I will definitely check out Aquarium Concepts, that is one I haven't been to.

As far as species goes I am kind of clueless. I was thinking of 3 or 4 trios of small-medium africans with varied coloration, but maybe a colony of one species would work better? When you say colony, do you mean 1 male and 5 females? Or with a good number of females could you get away with 2 or more males of the same species. I was under the impression that if you had small groups with different coloration/appearance you might have less trouble with agression, but I don't know if this is true.

I have no experience with aggressive fish as I have only kept community tanks in the past.

What I had in mind was something like this:

1 trio of Aulonocara of some kind,
1 trio of Labidochromis caeruleus (electric yellow hap),
1 trio of Julidochromis dickfeldi
1 trio of something else (Ps.saulosi would work here)
half a dozen schooling fish (thinking rainbows or maybe danios) for dither/target fish
a pleco or maybe a synodontis catfish

This is pretty much just a wild guess though, and I by no means do I have my heart set on this, just trying to come up with something for more knowledgable people to pick apart . Would love to hear what people think of this setup (assuming I can even get these fish). This seems like a lot of fish to me, at least when they are all grown, but I have heard that africans do better heavily stocked (with frequent water changes) and this doesn't seem like a lot compared to other "recipes" for africans that I have seen, so that's what I'm going by.

Also, do you think I went overboard on the rocks? I wound up buying quite a bit more than I needed (at $2 a pound ) so I kinda filled it up. I am afraid the fish will sit behind the rock wall all the time, but hopefully not.

Anyway, I am pretty excited about this project, and thanks in advance for any advice you can give me

Hmm, sorry to hear about the peacocks, they are quite the striking fish.

Thanks again for the advice Valerie. I had not seen rusties before, pretty cool fish. I just saw a picture of the female P. saulosi and they are definitely on my list now, kind of a suprise to see them look so much different than the males, but that is a good thing . I can tell I'm getting closer here not to mention that I am going to have a hard time waiting for the tank to cycle before putting fish in it.

Anybody know anything about Mylochromis lateristriga? Apparently this is another Malawi cichlid, but haven't seen any info on it other than pictures.



What do you think of having a few rainbows in with the africans? One of the LFSs I go to had some really great looking rainbows when I was there yesterday and I have heard of people using them as dither fish with africans, so that kind of peaked my interest.