Breeding secrets with hybridfish7: adoption

[Hybridfish7]

I am fortunate enough to have 2 things at my disposal: a pair of convicts that regularly spawns and regularly raises large numbers of fry to sexual maturity, and the luck of having all my pairs of cichlids coincidentally spawn within around a week of eachother.
Given that, if the species isn't rare enough to raise separately, I'll throw the batch of fry from that fish in with the convicts when they have fry. This is my second or third round of adoption with this pair, they'll raise the adopted fry for just as long as their own.

cichlid adopting her grandkids

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cichlid adopting her grandkids 2

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This batch of adoptive fry happens to just be more convicts, but still, if you have a particularly broody pair of fish, not exclusive to convicts, you will probably have luck with forced foster care if you need to save the space and time it would take to raise that batch yourself as long as the batch being introduced is similar in size and age to the pair's actual fry.
Pairs with two-four week old free swimming fry will raise wrigglers. Any older and the original batch will eat wrigglers.
I have had instances where non breeding fish will show parental behavior towards fry from other fish but I have yet to test if this is a viable way to rear fry.

 

[Hybridfish7]

Sorry if links didn't work, these should

 

[phreeflow]

People do this with discus

 

[C. Breeze]

I had cutteri, calico HRP x2 and rainbowncochlids all spawn within a week in a 75 gallon. Within 3 weeks it was just a conglomerate of fry and each pair was just guAring a piece of the tank and what we fry they had in the area with them. No effort was made to steal fry from
Other pairs of to keep fry from coming or going. Very intersting and when you look at how they do it in nature- especially rainbow cichlids will spawn in the same areas. The more pairs defending the bigger area = greater chance for success.

 

[Hybridfish7]

People do this with discus

Oh yeah I forgot about that, though I feel it's kind of a slightly different process with discus just because of the whole slime feeding thing
I should've specified this is for conventionally substrate spawning fish

 

[C. Breeze]

Oh yeah I forgot about that, though I feel it's kind of a slightly different process with discus just because of the whole slime feeding thing
I should've specified this is for conventionally substrate spawning fish

ive seen most cichlids fry feed off the parents slime coat. My proteus pikes were really starting to look ragged from it with the fry all at .75-1”.

 

[Hybridfish7]

Interesting, I knew aside from the main 3 people talk about vieja do it too, but I haven't heard of anything else doing it as a primary parental behavior.

 

[C. Breeze]

Interesting, I knew aside from the main 3 people talk about vieja do it too, but I haven't heard of anything else doing it as a primary parental behavior.

i don’t think it falls under the category of primary parental behiavior. I think it’s just opportunistic feeding by the fry that’s tolerated or encouraged to one degree or another. I e never seen fry do it as long or too the extent that my proteus pike fry did.