Hi, I am new to the boards .... I have a 100 gallon tank with 9 South African Cichlids (4 female, 5 male), 1 large Pleco, and 2 Pictus Catfish. The tank is filled with lots of rock and an extra large piece of driftwood. There is lots of caves, tunnels, holes, etc. The fish are so content that there seems to be non stop breeding as of lately. We did a cleaning this past weekend and were amazed to find at least 6 babies of varying sizes (one pretty large - about the size some of my cichlids were when we purchased them a year ago). Just when we thought we saw it all, we saw several tiny fry as well. My question is how do you get the fish to stop breeding? Can you have an all female or an all male tank? We know we will have to get the youngsters out in order to have them hopefully survive, but they are so darn good at hiding. We could let nature take it course, but some of these guys already have personalities and are swimming around. We figured the only way to probably do this would be to take out the wood and rock, which we would hate to do since currently everyone is happy. Anyhow, earlier in the day, it seemed as if another couple were spawning .... HELP! Thanks in advance. I have been lurking for quite some time, but finally joined on in today!
Cichlids Breeding Like Crazy
- Thread starter andreaflorkowsk
- Start date
Why would you want to keep your fish from breeding if they are happy? Let them eat the babies, with all the fish in that tank I'm suprised the eggs even make it to the fry stages. Theres nothing wrong with free food. Just because the fish have personalities doesn't mean you should remove them and grow them out. If all of us kept every convict we'd ever bred there'd be more convicts than feeders at our local fish stores. Anyways.. This doesn't seem like american behavior unless you have convicts and firemouths. This is very common in african tanks but almost never in american tanks with 12 fish. Are they getting aggressive towards one another while they are breeding? Just take the fry to a pet store or throw them on craigslist. People will be at your doorstep in minutes looking for the free fish. Let us know what kind of fish you've got.