no theory here, this is how it works. they come to the glass when I feed them, but no tail wagging, no no no we have none of that. its you going to drop in some pellets or am I wasting my time looking at you. I think they look at the Oscars on the other side of the room and think, geez look at those two, how humiliating.
Do you agree
- Thread starter dan518
- Start date
There is no straight No or a yes to this question....but I am leaning towards a Yes ( not as aggressive )....my reasoning( not a fair comparison..but some how can be related ).....even when lions/tigers reared in captivity are released back to the wild...there is a lot skeptism if they can ever survive....similarly the cichlids too, in a farm they are sure , they are going to be fed , constantly monitored , temperatures regulated...making them a wimp I guess
Aggression is usually relative to what else is in the tank, also the individual fish. The same fish that's docile in one tank might be a terror in another-- or the other way around. Those two reasons are often why some people think a species is really aggressive and others don't. Some fish are more bluff than bite and some will fight to the death with anything else of any size.
If I went by the firemouths I saw 40 years ago vs what I see today I'd say overall they're a milder fish. Same thing has happened with green terrors, only more so. Read about the first GTs brought into this country vs a typical lfs GT today, no comparison. Same with oscars from what I've seen, those I saw 40 years ago would eat or kill most anything the people I knew tried to keep with them.
If I went by the firemouths I saw 40 years ago vs what I see today I'd say overall they're a milder fish. Same thing has happened with green terrors, only more so. Read about the first GTs brought into this country vs a typical lfs GT today, no comparison. Same with oscars from what I've seen, those I saw 40 years ago would eat or kill most anything the people I knew tried to keep with them.
I agree 100% on the Oscar part. They are very predatory I would say they eat as much live food as parachromis species. inbred or not those Oscars go more nuts over live food than anything else I've owned. I would love to own a WILD Oscar someday and see how they really are same with GT
When I kept oscars and firemouths back in the late 1950, early 60s, some of the largest aquariums available were in the 50- 60 gallon range, which to me are little more than glorified puddles.
If I were an oscar, I'd be pretty ornery stuck in a puddle, kind of like locking a great dane in a bathroom.
Today average aquariums are 100 gallons and larger (the proper size for a 10" oscar), which can temper that sort of random aggression quite a bit.
If I were an oscar, I'd be pretty ornery stuck in a puddle, kind of like locking a great dane in a bathroom.
Today average aquariums are 100 gallons and larger (the proper size for a 10" oscar), which can temper that sort of random aggression quite a bit.
I have to say it's more the larger sized tanks available today as duanes said in combination to us keeping more territorial cichlids now then they did back in the day.
I find it hard to believe a couple of generations in a pond would be enough to overwrite millennia worth of evolution.
I find it hard to believe a couple of generations in a pond would be enough to overwrite millennia worth of evolution.
I agree tank size is a factor, thought of mentioning it above but had time for just a short post and didn't go into it. However, tank size is not the whole story ime. In some species, like A. ruviulatus, the wilds I've had have been a whole different animal than captive bred. As far as overwriting millenia of adaptation in a short time, it's a reasonable point that seems logical on the surface, but there are subtle ways in which it doesn't necessarily hold up scientifically.
There are many instances of rapid adaptations known in science, some within just a few generations, not to mention morphological plasticity built into some species (intestinal length of tropheus, for example) and plasticity of gene expression and regulation. There's a lot more to this than I'll take time and space to go into, but as just one example, there was a study done with salmon a few years ago (Kihslinger RL, Nevitt GA (2006) - Early rearing environment impacts cerebellar growth in juvenile salmon. J Exp Biol. 2006 Feb 1;209(Pt 3):504-9) that found an enriched environment for salmon fry, as opposed to a bare tank, affects brain structure and behavior. Effectively, bare tanks can potentially produce stupid (uh, developmentally challenged) fish, at least in some respects.
Also, go back some years and our model of DNA was as something hard wired, it was often compared to a blueprint. Now researchers are seeing it more as software. In software there's a lot of "if, then" logic. If this happens or this or that condition is detected, then carry out this routine, else (otherwise) carry out this other routine. You can code a lot of triggers that respond to environmental conditions as monitored by various hardware, something as simple as a thermostat, for example. Research is finding that a lot of that sort of thing appears to happen genetically. Which leads me to the epigenome, chemistry apart from but associated with DNA that regulates DNA. It can turn genes off and on, tell genes when to do something, respond to environmental triggers, etc. The epigenome responds to 'signals', including from the environment, can learn (record) from its 'experiences' and pass signals (information) from certain environmental triggers on to the next generation (here's a non-technical link), providing a mechanism for changes in response to the environment that may take place within the lifetime of an organism or may be passed on to the next or future generations, contrary to the post Lamarckian biology most of us grew up with.
So, on more than one level it's not impossible for a species' behavior to change in captivity in a few generations. To what extent no doubt depends on the species and individual.
There are many instances of rapid adaptations known in science, some within just a few generations, not to mention morphological plasticity built into some species (intestinal length of tropheus, for example) and plasticity of gene expression and regulation. There's a lot more to this than I'll take time and space to go into, but as just one example, there was a study done with salmon a few years ago (Kihslinger RL, Nevitt GA (2006) - Early rearing environment impacts cerebellar growth in juvenile salmon. J Exp Biol. 2006 Feb 1;209(Pt 3):504-9) that found an enriched environment for salmon fry, as opposed to a bare tank, affects brain structure and behavior. Effectively, bare tanks can potentially produce stupid (uh, developmentally challenged) fish, at least in some respects.
Also, go back some years and our model of DNA was as something hard wired, it was often compared to a blueprint. Now researchers are seeing it more as software. In software there's a lot of "if, then" logic. If this happens or this or that condition is detected, then carry out this routine, else (otherwise) carry out this other routine. You can code a lot of triggers that respond to environmental conditions as monitored by various hardware, something as simple as a thermostat, for example. Research is finding that a lot of that sort of thing appears to happen genetically. Which leads me to the epigenome, chemistry apart from but associated with DNA that regulates DNA. It can turn genes off and on, tell genes when to do something, respond to environmental triggers, etc. The epigenome responds to 'signals', including from the environment, can learn (record) from its 'experiences' and pass signals (information) from certain environmental triggers on to the next generation (here's a non-technical link), providing a mechanism for changes in response to the environment that may take place within the lifetime of an organism or may be passed on to the next or future generations, contrary to the post Lamarckian biology most of us grew up with.
So, on more than one level it's not impossible for a species' behavior to change in captivity in a few generations. To what extent no doubt depends on the species and individual.
Last edited:
...Then again, when I think back I had a 100 gal tank as a kid in the early/mid 1960s, so not everyone had small tanks at the time. You could get a bigger tank if you wanted one.
