Mbuna Community or Species? Suggestions, please!

Saulosi are my favorites for their childlike behavior. The following goes well with them in temperment and to complete the color patterns:

- Blue socolofi 1m/2f
- Snowwhite socolofi 2
- Electrci yellows 1m/3f, try to get a gentle male
- Super red empress 1m/2f, try to get them small so they are not hormonized

You can keep 2m/4f saulosi and a pleco with them. You can some of the following to fill a 100G or all of them to fill a 240G.


- some male peacocks
- frontosa
- single species of troupheus
- Electric blue Johanni
- red fin obliqueden

This is basically my set up. If you are in Southern California, you are welcome to come and see the set up.

Good luck,

Since you said you wanted to stick to one lake, i reccommend Lake Malawi, you can get some wonderful combinations.

A species tank of saulosi would look wonderful (see my avatar ). In a 240 gallon, if you wanted to JUST do saulosi, you could keep like 50 of them in there... at least! And have a ratio of 1 male 4 females...so you could keep several males.

Or, get a good sized group of saulosi, like about 15-20 fish. There's your blue/black and yellow/oragnge colors. Now you could add in some contrasting colors of mbuna, like albino whites, maybe horizontal stripes in some melanochromis, OBs, 'red' zebras... anything! In that size of tank you dont need to worry about over aggressiveness because there will be lots of room for the victim to escape. If you get a good filtration system then you can slightly crowd them as well. There are so many mbuna out there.

You could also do a mixed tank with haps and mbuna. In a large tank you will notice the mbuna staying near the rocks and the haps utilizing the open swimming space... which would look really neat. Again, you could get some large beautiful species in there. But remember if you keep large predetory haps in with smaller mbuna they *might* eventually become dinner. Too many species to mention, it all depends on what you like. Stick to the blue/yellow scheme if you want to build the tank around the saulosis... and maybe throw in a couple reds like in the Red Empress.

Or, you could nix the mbuna alltogether and focus on a hap tank. The possiblities are endless!

Visit this site: http://www.malawimayhem.com They have tons of species profiles with lotsa pictures, and thier forum is great for asking malawi-related questions.


HTH
-Diana

Species tanks are cool, and with a large tank (e.g., 180) you could even keep several of the larger varieties (e.g., frontosas, Nimochromis livinstonii) that aren't possible in smaller tanks.

One caution: if you have a large species tank, think about what you'll do with fry. My 180 was overrun with kennyi that bred like bunnies. I tried getting "predatory" haps and the like, but they were unable to control the population, which ballooned to the point that maintenance, water changes, etc. became onerous. A large tank, with lots of rockwork, is very hard to empty enough to capture fry. I was able to thin out the kennyi population by trapping juveniles in minnow trap and giving the fish away, but I still eventually had to empty the tank to get all the kennyi out. (No more breeding pairs in that tank, thank you very much!)

Just something to keep in mind...

Have fun with the big tank.

Jim