anyone keeping etroplus (chromide) species?

[triazole]

just wondering if anyone is currently keeping or have kept chromides. i'm guessing e. canarensis (banded chromide) is out of question. but orange chromides (e. maculatus) and green chromides (e. suratensis) are pretty common. i'd also like to know if anyone has kept them in freshwater or mildly brackish tanks.

 

[severum mama]

I believe the orange and green chromides are BW fish, but I haven't kept any and don't know much about them. I don't think they are easy to come by around here, but they sound cool.

 

[severum mama]

Oops, double post.

 

[triazole]

i got hold of 6 orange chromides at my lfs (not the natural strain). they were kept in a mildly brackish tank, and i kept them in a similar setup too (~1tsp salt per 5g). they were fine for the first week or so. but about to days earlier, they started having stringy fecal matter. i have been treating them with gel-tek (food soaked with it), but have lost two in the process.
the reason i was wondering is this article by vinny kutty - http://www.aquarticles.com/articles/travel/Kutty_Indiacollecting.html

The other two Chromides are excellent aquarium residents. Orange Chromide (aka Red Chromide), an aquarium color variant of the original is one of the most desirable cichlids you could keep. They are colorful, small (3 inches max.), fairly peaceful (I keep them with tetras and curviceps), hardy, eat anything, not shy, easily bred, cheap and easily available. I will never know why they're not the most popular cichlids. I've maintained a wild color morph of this species for the last 10 years and I never tire of it. The pair I have make babies on a regular basis. I once raised a brood to commercial size and distributed it around but nowadays, I just let the other fish eat the fry.
The Green Chromide is a larger, herbivorous cichlid, that gets about as big as a Severum. Like Severums, it requires a lot of vegetable matter in its diet. I used to feed it leaves of Romaine lettuce, spinach, frozen peas, zucchini and some cichlid pellets. This fish is also happier at a water temperature of about 80 F. In the aquarium literature, you will often read that this fish should be kept in brackish water and that it requires high temperatures like Discus (85-88 F) but these conditions seem a bit rigid after having seen them in the wild. This fish is most often seen in warm coastal lagoons, where it grows to about 14 inches but I also saw it in soft water with a pH of about 6.5, almost 100 miles from the Arabian Sea. The water was NOT brackish and the temperature was only about 77 F. Of course, in softer, cooler waters, this fish is not very abundant and it does not grow to sizes larger than 6 inches. The largest specimen I measured was a little smaller than 7 inches.