boadams87
Aquarium Advice Addict
Andy Sager said:They need to be at least 3 years old and 7 to 8 inches long. Males tend to have a pointed dorsal but in truth, it's very difficult to see. Females will tend to be a bit rounder in the middle than a male. Best time to see this is before you feed.
The best way to get a real pair is to buy about 12 small or medium fish and put them in a big tank and grow them up. They will naturally pair off as the odds of getting all one gender from that many fish is small. ( I once did this with FW Angelfish and wound up with 6 breeding pairs out of 12 fish. What are the odds of that???)
Keep in mind that when I was breeding Oscars, there were no veiltails or albinos or any of the newer colors. We just had Common, Reds and Red Tigers to choose from. I imported a pair of Emerald Greens from Germany back in the 60s but they didn't make it so I don't know if that color strain survived.
Fair warning: You will need a number of tanks to rear the fry because you can't crowd them and expect them to grow. (My pairs averaged about 500 surviving babies per spawn.) I was breeding the pairs in custom made 35 gal tanks and taking the eggs from the parents. Eggs went into 10 gal tanks until hatched and moved to a 40 long after the fry started eating Brine shrimp. I split up the spawn as the fish got larger. Multiply this by 13 pairs and as you can see, I had A LOT of Oscars to sell
Happy spawning
Thanx. They are 5 years old. That sounds like alot of work.