cichlids for a 10g - apologies to those who i have offended

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thanks for the support ham. i've introduced 4 jewels, and i'll be keeping a strict eye on them. in case the rifts become too great for them to handle, i'll return them. i don't have the choice of upgrading so soon.
Interesting observation jay. could you include the size of the tank with the convicts and jewels please? I'm pretty sure i'll have to return 2 if and when a pair forms. in a 10g i don't have the space to introduce dithers. so for the time being the jewels will serve as their own dithers. there are no problems regarding hiding, they are all curious and outgoing fish, and have established a hierarchy in a short while. there doesn't seem to be any sexual advances yet, or none that i can decipher. but as they mature, i'm sure i'll have to introduce dithers in the form of danios or others. but that's strictly after i return two.

does anyone have an idea about the courting behavior of jewels? jay?

Edit:
triazole said:
i'd like to know about personal experiences, preferences, and ideas. thanks in advance for your help.
VC, i didn't ask for advice. i put forth a list of cichlids and my limitations. its upto me to decide whether i follow the extra "advice" i get along the way. besides, while keeping fish for twenty years has provided you with a great deal of experience, i believe its impossible for you to gather all that is to know about cichlids. so, you'll have to excuse me if i decline your advice.
i have no intention of risking a pet's health too. at the first instance that the tank becomes a warfield, i'm going to return them or take appropriate measures. thanks again for your help.
 
I have them in a 90G, so there is lots of space for people to flee too.

Without any dithers, the aggression of the spawning pair will be taken out on each other. So, you may end up with fry and one dead parent. Put some danios in or they will beat each other up. My female already gets aggressive with the male if he has been on the other side of the tank for a bit.

As for courting behaviour, the female started to get a lot more red, and the males would try to court her. She ripped the scales of some of the others, but luckily she didn't kill any of them. The one male that she chose would keep rushing in front of her to cut off her movement and flare out all his fins as wide as they would go. That passed for a while, and then he started pointing his head down towards the substrate and would shake himself at her. When they got very close to spawning, I noticed that she had started to do the same head-down shaking to him as well. Then....poof, eggs.
 
wow, that' a big tank :). i understand the importance of dithers. but for now, my hands are tied. interesting courting behavior. seems like a matriarchal society. but i guess i still have some way to go till they reach breeding age. 1 of them is around 2", 2 at 1.5" and 1 at 1".
 
I don't think at any point I made mention of having gathered all the information available regarding cichlids. Not a day goes by that I don't learn something new from my own fish or from another hobbyist via web forums, personal contact, etc.

I would expect your "theory" to be fine- right up until the first fish reaches sexual maturity. After that, well, I sincerely hope you are able to intervene before fish are injured/killed.

Just out of curiousity- have you ever kept cichlids before? It seems to me that anyone with even a little bit of experience would understand what you are attempting to do is an exercise in futility, in addition to be potentially dangerous.
 
Ben, please read previous posts before commenting.

VC, i don't think the discussion between you and me is going anywhere. you're continually trying to convince me that a pair of jewels can't be kept in a 10g based on some flimsy reasons (which in the next post you'll say are not flimsy). so i'd prefer to stop interacting with you on this topic.
 
triazole said:
to make a few things clear, i don't want a community tank, just a pair. if i can find a pair, well and good. if not, i'll introduce about 5 of them (with diligent, large pwcs) till a pair forms, and then separate the rest. i'd like to know about personal experiences, preferences, and ideas. thanks in advance for your help.

It is daunting to make such a request and not expect responses to include this information. Rather than dismiss the advice the members have provided, try looking at it with objectivity. At that point, you can make your decision based on all aspects of cichlid keeping, which include aggression, spawning behaviors and space requirements.
 
You hit the nail on the head, Jchillin.

Triazole- you're right, it's time to end this discussion. You've obviously got your mind made up and aren't going to be swayed. You're also right about me stating in my next post that I'll say my reasons aren't "flimsy". Like I said, my advice is based on many years of experience and a good bit of common sense. I'd say the same goes for the others who've pointed out the folly of your actions.

I wish your fish the best of luck as you go about proving your point.
 
IMHO, he will get a pariing, provided that a compatible male and female survive to sexual maturity. Which, with jewel cichlids, is a very difficult thing to find. If the pair isn't compatible they end up fighting and sometimes one of the attempted pair end up dead.

OK, so, let's suppose that triazole manages to somehow have a compatible male and female in this 10G tank. Should that happen, he will probably find out about the pairing when one of the non-paired jewels is dead in the tank and the other is badly wounded. After being a thoughtful person and nursing the surviving jewel back to health he would return it to the LFS.

Danios or larger barbs would have to be added as dithers to divert the aggression in the new pair away from each other. This would suffice until the eggs hatch and the parents move the eggs from the rock where they were laid to a cave or pit somewhere in the tank. One the fry are free-swimming, the "globe" that the parents defend will grow as the fry swim about. Since a 10G tank only measures 24.25" x 8.5" x 12.625 inches, the jewel will effectively defend a little over half of the tank length, all of the width, and height at one time. Anything venturing into their "globe" or protection for their fry will be attacked. A danio might survive one or two strikes before being crippled. So, triazole will need to have lots of cash to expend on replenishing his depleting stock of dithers.

I have a 6.5" inch oscar that thought the fry might fit nicely in his mouth and he ventured down for a taste. Anyone who knows oscars will notice that, like children, if it fits in the mouth, that's where it's supposed to go :) Well, he was hit once, and hard, by the female and she took a line of scales off of his side about 1.5" inches long. Now I have a little pimafix and melafix in there to help him recover. Needless to say, he doesn't go near the fry any more.

Of course, each and every chichlid is different and people can only go from their own experiences with a particular one, or generalize about the species. I know people who say that they have very aggressive firemouths, but I have three and they never do anything to anyone. My Bolivian rams used to bully them until I got a separate tank for the rams.

But any cichlid, when spawning, will be much more aggressive than when not.

I would have been easier for triazole to look for a LFS that was selling an already mated pair of jewels. The hardest part is getting them to find a suitable partner that they won't attack and kill. Once that is done.....they will breed like convicts. The LFS will more readily accept small jewels, but don't expect them to pay, or pay much.
 
JC, i have tried looking objectively at the advice provided, and it didn't make a lot of sense to me. maybe i'm a bit stubborn, but if i'm mistaken, i'll readily give them up. till now i've seen plenty of aggression, but none to suggest a fatal confrontation. the tank has plenty of driftwood and moss to break up their lines of sight and provide retreats.

VC, thanks for the wishes :).

Jay, thanks for the overall picture. i'll update the thread on how things progress. from what i'm see so far, danios would have a hard time getting away from the four jewels. so i'd hold them off for the time being. its not easy to find a mated pair of jewels. believe me, i tried.
 
Just want to let you know of an experience my friend had with his jewels..
He had 2 and they lived ok together in a 20g tall tank. They got a little bigger and decided to breed. Once the eggs were laid, the male ends up killing the female.
Maybe the male decided the female was no longer needed? Maybe he felt that she was now invading his territory? I don't know..
The fry were born and lived fine with the father for some time. They were all brought to a LFS when they were about 1-1.5" long. Many of them did not survive to this size. Some attacked each other and that was likely the cause of some of the deaths.

What I'm trying to say is that these cichlids can be very unpredictable. You never know when they'll just decide to lash out and go from being somewhat placid to very vicious in a split second.

I think only a large tank with many hiding places and having a seperate just-in-case tank is the best way to keep such a fish successfully. HTH
 
ROK, that the male in your friend's tank killed the female could have stemmed from not having dithers. Without outsiders to vent and bash on, they will turn on each other.

Triazole: I would be interested in seeing how you managed to put lots of driftwood and moss into a 10G tank.

Heck, you even have to be careful to keep them well fed while they are with fry. Every once in a while, as I'm watching the tank, I notice them picking up the fry in their mouth to spit them back somewhere safe......only sometimes they don't spit.
 
triazole said:
in case the pair breeds, and i'm pretty sure they will, i don't want to keep the fry. i'll use them as food for other predatory fish.
Jay, i'm sure raising fry in a 10g would be pointless, given Rok's confirmation of the predatory nature of the fry. and i don't have the resources to set up a grow-out tank. but i'm concerned about separating all the fry from the parents. i have no idea how well they'll like the idea, and whether one of the pair wlll blame the other for the sudden disappearance of the fry.
i don't have a digicam yet. so, i won't be able to upload pix. i tried to arrange rocks and driftwood so that the tank becomes divided into a number of zones. i'm also surprised with the recuperative power of these fish. the smallest of the jewels came with a half-chewed tail from the lfs. it has regrown the tail within these few days.

Rok, thanks for the info.
 
till now i've seen plenty of aggression, but none to suggest a fatal confrontation
There may not be an all out fatal confrontation. It is well documented that cichlids can die of stress. One day it may be fine, the next day a little darker in color and on the third day dead, or diseased. I lost a favorite fish this way in my 80 gal. I knew she was being chased/targeted and I was ready to pull the offender, but due to the work involved, I had to wait for the weekend. The next day she had a gross infection and had turned almost completely white. We tried to save her, but it was too late. Some cichlids will stop eating, mope by themselves and eventually die. With only two fish you will be able to keep closer tabs on them and separate if necessary.
 
Menagerie said:
With only two fish you will be able to keep closer tabs on them and separate if necessary.
i'll indeed be keeping two of them. but that's when two pair off. before that i might as well keep just one.
 
VC, the cichlid-forum guy had kept jewels and bred them for a long time. the MCH guys, especially reclos is one of the leading authorities on cichlids at this moment. and the fact that i'm a born skeptic doesn't help either.

anyways, to update the progress, the introduction of zebra danios as dithers met with complete failure. within twelve hours of the introduction of three, two were hunted down and eaten. the third was crippled, but survived with half-a-tail. he/she has been moved to another tank.
 
Jewels - Update

with three feedings a day, one of them being frozen bloodworms, and 50% pwc every alternate day, the four jewels introduced into the tank have grown fast in the last 3 weeks. i had replaced danios with BA tetras as dithers. these fish are extremely fast, and tend to nip each other a lot. for that reason, or for some other reason (size being one of them), they actually withstood the jewels. i had seen no signs of pairing till now.

day before yesterday i went to the lfs where i had bought the jewels from, and noticed four of them (the ones that were left after i bought four), hanging out together at the top, which is very unusual for them. so i peeped around, and there "they" were. there were four small convicts in the same tank, and as the proverbial rabbits of the fishy kingdom, two had paired off, and were protecting a brood of fry. from what i read from the situation, the jewels won't last long in there with the male convict viciously attacking them every few minutes.

so i went back home, gave my goldies away to another lfs, got some rocks and driftwood from my other tanks, and setup a 29g. currently there are eight jewels in the 29g. i'll continue with the regular beefed up feedings and pwc's till they mature, and take it from there.
 
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