Holy crap!! What do I do now??

[hulkamaniac]

Well, I was stunned today to discover my convicts swimming around with a small cloud of fry. I'd just added a male convict about a week or so ago. I figured they weren't getting along as I never ever saw them together. Then the female started hiding in a cave and charging at the male. I just figured they had established their territories in the tank. Now I see the female with a cloud of fry. I'm not sure what do at this point. I'm going out of town for two weeks and the person watching my fish knows nothing about fishkeeping. I really can't rely on her for water changes. Also, what do I feed these guys? They didn't seem interested in rising to my crushed flake offering. I've never bred egg layers before so I'm really excited.

 

[Jman17H]

Convicts are the rabbits of the cichlid world and it does not take much to keep the young alive. The parents will protect them from any and all who attempt to harm them and you should not really need to feed them anything special besides crushed flake.

They are very very hardy from my xperience and I always had more problems figuring out how to get rid of them.

The warning and I am assuming you know this, is that if they have other tank mates, you should expect the parents to annihilate them. I had a mating pair trap and drown my turtle and completely got rid of the convicts afterwards!