Festae Juvies Fighting lol

[buddha1200]

my group is pretty chill(for now)they are only 3-3.5 inches,will be moving them to 125 in the summer cureently have 7 in a 75 gallon with a few haits. so far so good i will keep my fingers crossed.

 

[Sarah88]

i think with yours being so small it wont be a "wake up and they are all dead" type of situation, thats usually when they are older. for me it was actually subtly at first because they kept getting bloat one by one and i couldnt figure out why because they are not known for getting this and then i noticed that it was usually the smallest one so the dominant one was harassing and picking on the smallest one till it bloated from stress and then moved on to the next smallest one, etc. the others actually fought a little bit but werent relentless like this little guy was, when i got down to 3 from probably 15-20 fry (all still less than an inch) i divided them each into their own little section and then after a couple weeks thought i would try again to have them all together since my filter was having trouble with two dividers in the tank so i tried that and within the next couple of days he was by himself he was an awesome little fish though i kind of regret getting rid of him

 

[cacichlids]

Around 4" is when they started to color up very well. But I still had some mistakes sexing them visually until they started going into breeding dress. The dominant female killed all the other females and the dominant male killed all of the males. I bought them very small, maybe and inch. At the end of the year my male was a little over 6" and the female was around 5".
These are some old pictures of a few of them.

woah that little female looked really nice.... can't wait til mine start showing any color. for now they only have red fins, the rest is pretty much brown with a yellowish tint and some barring.

5" in a year seems like a really slow growth rate though, considerably slower than any other cichlid I've kept... maybe I should have bought that 3 year old female that they were selling, instead of fry. But I was afraid a mature female would immediately kill all of her tank mates... most of my fish are in juvenile stage right now (biggest is maybe 5").

my group is pretty chill(for now)they are only 3-3.5 inches,will be moving them to 125 in the summer cureently have 7 in a 75 gallon with a few haits. so far so good i will keep my fingers crossed.

That is good to know. Mine are 7 in a 120 gal and the biggest is like 1.5" max.

i think with yours being so small it wont be a "wake up and they are all dead" type of situation, thats usually when they are older. for me it was actually subtly at first because they kept getting bloat one by one and i couldnt figure out why because they are not known for getting this and then i noticed that it was usually the smallest one so the dominant one was harassing and picking on the smallest one till it bloated from stress and then moved on to the next smallest one, etc. the others actually fought a little bit but werent relentless like this little guy was, when i got down to 3 from probably 15-20 fry (all still less than an inch) i divided them each into their own little section and then after a couple weeks thought i would try again to have them all together since my filter was having trouble with two dividers in the tank so i tried that and within the next couple of days he was by himself he was an awesome little fish though i kind of regret getting rid of him

Well I've read both festae and haitiensis are very prone to bloat when young (under 2") but the cause seems to be unknown... some people blame high protein diets, some blame stress, etc. None of mine looks sick so far and I've been feeding them nls thera+ and bloodworms... I recently had to net a hujeta gar and pull a festae out of its mouth because it tried to eat the poor thing during a water change... the festae is doing fine, the hujeta gar went back to the lfs.

If I get an overly aggressive one I'll immediately separate it from the rest.

 

[Sarah88]

oh i didnt know they were prone to that but yeah i lost a couple in the beginning from feeding too much frozen brineshrimp but once i corrected this they were fine and then all of a sudden started bloating and i would watch him relentlessly pick on a single fish so im almost 100% sure thats what was happening haha

and yeah festae have a very slow growth rate, much slower than most cichlids. 5-6in within the first year is actually on the faster side of growth for a festae