I was able to catch either a fight or a mating ritual with my two butterfly fish. One is male one and is female. They appear to be snapping at each other. Then they swim and then one grabs the other by the mouth. I do have two videos one where the male grabs the female and one vice versa. This went on for a maybe 5-10 minutes this morning. Anyone with experience know what they are doing? I’ll try to get both videos on here.
African Butterfly, are they fighting or mating?
- Thread starter Texas1203
- Start date
Had 3 ABF but never seen anything intense like what those 2 are displaying. I know for breeding the water level has to be dropped.
Tbh I can't give you a answer of what it could be territorial or spawning.
I got a much better video of the behavior. They appear to snap at each other. Then they grab the mouths. Most of the action is at the end of the video. I tried to get as much as I could. The female changes color, idk if this is normal, but she does it all the time. Going from real light to dark.
I did do some research on this. The only research paper I found regarding mating stated that the two types of ABF come from the Congo or Niger rivers. These two species are in the same species but they found a 15% difference in their dna structure. Normally there is only about a 1-2% difference in fish species. The amount of difference in their dna is what would normally be found in a family of a species (like the entire family of bichirs v. one species of bichirs). Idk if these two came from different rivers, but it was an interesting read. I’ll post link if it will let me.https://phys.org/news/2010-10-genetics-african-butterfly-fish.amp
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