You might get away with that for a while but if a pair forms you will not want to have four. Like any acara they are very rough on each other when in spawning mode.
Bujurquina oenolaemus
- Thread starter ryansmith83
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You might get away with that for a while but if a pair forms you will not want to have four. Like any acara they are very rough on each other when in spawning mode.
At least a 4’ tank, either a 55 or 75 with sand and lots of cover, as well as movable things like leaves or thin pieces of slate for them to use as mobile nurseries.
I have just been reading through this thread, as I have recently acquired some baby Bujurquinas and was trying to find all info possible on them. I already knew about the leaf spawning and mouth brooding behaviour and have often thought it would be interesting to keep some. But it seems that despite their interesting behaviour, relatively small size and apparently not terribly aggressive temperaments, they are not particularly popular as aquarium fish. Anyway, a friend was working in the Southern Amazon region of Ecuador, close to the border with Peru and captured a pair of adults and some youngsters, about 2.5cm ( 1") of which he offered me 5. It seems the western Amazon region in Ecuador and Peru is very rich in endemic Bujurquina species, each of which has a very limited geographic range, and many of which are not yet described. Ecuador apparently has 11 or 12 potential species. Going by what the adults look like, and the collecting location the ones I have seem most like to be the species that the authors of the paper I will attach are calling called B. sp. middle Pastaza-Morona, but I could be wrong. At the moment I have the 5 little guys in a 180l (47 gallon) tank along with a group of Guianacara of the same size. Their behavior is very different to the guianacaras, which always go round together in a group and always beg for food. The Bujurquinas are slightly more shy, much more independent and I rarely see more than one at once, except when feeding, even then not all of them appear at any one time.
That spawning on a leaf behaviour is similar to Andinocara coerleopunctatus, and allows them to move the eggs out of harms way (especially in places where eggs predators like plecos are common), and considered by some, to be a precursor to a mouth breeding step in evolution.
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I also had a pair Cichlasoma amazonarum that did this the first couple of times they spawned. It was very interesting to watch them, sometimes while moving the leaf it would turn upside-down and they would spend ages trying to turn it over again. Subsequent spawns were bigger, probably too big to fit on the relatively small leaves I had in the tank, and they later spawned on solid surfaces. Though once they split the spawn, half on a rock and half on a leaf one parent guarding each!
Cichlasoma amazonarum (and the other SA Cichlasomas) also used to be included in the genus Aequidens.
These are some shots I took from the video I was sent of the adult Bujurquinas, I haven't seen them myself:
And this is the link to the paper I mentioned (tried to send the pdf but it didn't work).
Repeated ecomorphological divergence in Bujurquina (Teleostei: Cichlidae) body shape
Based on recent discoveries, Bujurquina appears to be the most widely distributed and species-rich cichlid genus in the western Amazon of South America. In this study, using a large representative sample of Bujurquina covering its whole distribution area, we use morphological and molecular data...bioone.org
And another thing, the person who caught them told me that in the same river there were also some tetras, similar in size and shape to diamond tetras, with a yellow dorsal fin, some small spotted plecos and some large shrimps that he is hoping to collect on another occasion... No idea what these species are, but one day it might be interesting to try a biotope tank? Even if I can only keep one pair of the Bujurquinas eventually, in a 4ft, 63 gallon approx that I could potentially make available.
