Black frontosa?
- Thread starter woofy
- Start date
Not really. I've kept and/or bred fronts over 20 years and I've been a mod/admin on a well known Cyphotilapia site for years, so beyond personal experience I've seen quite a large sample size of Cyphotilapia and Cyphotilapia keepers. All dark or black is an individual thing, occasionally stress, often it's simply mood or attitude. Occasionally it's genetic but it's hardly the usual result of inbreeding. I've had individuals that were very dark, black, and purple for a few years in one tank lighten up and stay lighter for years after moving to another tank. The fish above could be in the same category, which is more common than a genetically or permanently unusually black front. Then again, I knew someone who had an unusually dark wild female that consistently produced deeply colored offspring.
Burundi have been around a long time in the hobby, it's not unusual to see messed up black bars, split and merged bars, or black blotches instead of bars. One reason for this is Cyphotilapia take a few years to begin producing fry, breed less often, then produce fewer fry per spawn than most other cichlids. Because of this many breeders are not willing to cull, so now we see a lot of bar imperfections in the Burundi frontosa in some lfs. Some people have intentionally line bred these blotchy imperfections and marketed them as expensive 'black widow' frontosa.
I'm not putting very dark fronts with solid bars in that category. You'd have to see photos to judge that. But, as I say, it can sometimes be stress, is often mood or attitude, and occasionally you can get an individual that's unusually dark genetically. This is random, not what "usually" happens breeding closely related Cyphotilapia, not unless you happened to randomly get parent breeders with just the right combination of genes. If someone's told you it usually happens they're basing it on a small sample size or going by hearsay.
The notion that you must have wild parents to get quality Cyphotilapia fry is also a myth. It takes an investment of some years to get past F1 and find this out, but I've done it with Kapampa gibberosa, from some of the early kaps imported here. No doubt others have done it by now also with other Congo gibberosa that have been around a while, like Moba. Quality depends on the genes of the parents, some parent combinations will produce offspring that are prettier, darker, lighter, more blue, etc., just like most other cichlids.
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