Well, after I made the video, one of the others is saying hybrid for the blue guy. He said the body is Aulonocara but the head is wrong. Is that something that you see?
I watched the vid again, several times, and I don't see head shape as being abnormal for an
Aulonocara sp. Actually, the biggest concern I had with an
Aulonocara ID from the beginning was the number of eggspots. It does have a lot of egg spots for a peacock, the number being more in line with the typical utaka. With that said, the number of eggspots isn't anywhere near being outside reasonable for a peacock when you consider the plasticity of peacock appearance. The number of egg spots is just on the high end.
I am a firm believer that the occurence of cichlid hybridization in the hobby is severely overstated. I stopped posting at MFK and the Cichlid Forum years ago because there was a group of guys at each who would say everything was a hybrid, even when the OP was just sharing pictures and would actually state that they were pure-bred in the post. Sometimes the OP would show parent and offspring pics and these guys would say that one or the other or both parents were hybrids, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. These guys' interpretation of "Assorted Africans" was that they were all hybrids. What "Assorted Africans" actually means is that the fish included are either oddball fish (sports) that were accidently imported or shipped in a group of a specific species (i.e. one
Melanochromis sp. with a group of
Metriaclima sp.) and couldn't be shipped with an order or that these are fish that were leftovers that didn't go out with other fish of their species because a retailer ordered 12, and there were say 14 left. The extra two go into the "Assorted African" shipment. Sometimes these fish actually are not known to the wholesaler when they come in with a shipment of wild fish. I'm not saying there are no hybrids in assorted African shipments. The fact is that OB "peacocks" (which may or may not be hybrids, that's a whole other topic in itself) and line-bred varieties of peacocks end up in these shipments, so I'm sure that the occasional hybrid makes it in as well. I am saying that just because a fish is in an "Assorted African" shipment does not mean it is automatically a hybrid, and in an overwhelming number of cases it is not. Since pure-bred fish are worth far more, it doesn't profit a breeder or fish farm to breed a bunch of mongrel offspring that can't be identified and won't bring top dollar. The only exceptions to this economic philosophy are hybrids that have become fixed strains and are available as such, like flowerhorns, parrots and OB peacocks (maybe). Even here, a fish that is recognizable as a specific strain is going to bring a lot higher price than a hybrid between the strain and another fish.
My observation has been that a lot of folks claim hybrid when they can't identify what a species actually is. A lot of hobbyists are under the misunderstanding that putting a male and female of two different species together will automatically result in mating and hybrid offspring. I've seen folks claim "hybrid" stating two species so different that it is genetically not possible for them to hybridize. Mother nature has built in mechanisms that discourage (and often prevent) hybridization, even between two closely related species. I'm amazed how so many cichlid hobbyists labor under this "hybrid" fallacy, when livebearer and killifish hobbyists face the same problems but don't see a "hybrid" in every fish they can't ID.
So, I'm not saying that the guy on the other forum who suggested it's a hybrid is one of the uninformed folks who sees a hybrid in every fish, don't get me wrong. I'm not downplaying his opinion or expertise. I don't know anything about him. He may be right. I said from the beginning that I wasn't as sure about ths one as I usually am. Even though I had concerns about the egg spots as well, I do disagree. I just wanted to clarify that any time "hybrid" is thrown out as an ID for a fish that the reasons it's being called a hybrid should be looked at a little deeper and not merely accepted as gospel.
WYite