Festae partners

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sstromerson

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Mar 16, 2009
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Washington
So my Festae has started to pick on my polystigma even though they have gotten along alright for a couple months. I was wondering what kind of fish I could put in there to distract the festae from my polystigma.
Any suggestions?
 
Green terrors make good tankmates same with crenicichla species. But you may just run into the other cichlids picking on your poly as well. Maybee a school of silver dollars. The truth is though red terrors are properly labled as terrors they are highly aggresive. Good luck.

Also might I suggest keeping africans with africans and south ameicans with south americans.
 
I have a texas with mine and he's the tank sherrif. He's the same lenght as the festae but taller. I also have cutteri and convict dithers. The festae doesn't mess with the sengal but bangs on the pitcus cats every once in a while if she wants their cave.
 
Ive kept any/all of the following with single festae up to 10 inches successfully:

carpintis, motaguensis, managuensis, dovii, friedrichsthalii, labiatus, trimaculatus, grammodes, buttikofferi, convicts & silver dollars.
 
I have had the festae 3 years and got the rest of them around a 18 months later and as they got bigger, i got rid of the labiatus first, then butti, freddi & silver dollars. Then, as the others got bigger, I sold the dovii pair 6" & carpintis 8" & moved the RTM pair to a local college.

At the point he was at 10 inches, i finally found a female he liked and decided to try and spawn with.

So I was down to the festae pair, the trimac 11"(the tank boss), managuensis pair 6", grammodes pair 4", about 12 convicts, a pictus and a syno.

Everything was great and the festae had their place in the tank. They spawned and everything was fine until I moved the trimac to the same college as the RTMs 2 weeks later on a thursday...came home from work friday, everything was fine. Woke up saturday morning and the grammodes, pictus & convicts were dead. The managuensis pair were basically scaled and the syno was on his last leg.

The male went bat$hit crazy. I moved the managuensis pair to a friends fish store and re-homed the syno. The balance was fine until I moved the trimac...big mistake.

Keep in mind they were all in a 265 with about 150lbs of driftwood and about 15 live plants...tons of hiding places.

The male might have been just as docile (and probably would have) as hed always been since I had him had I not put a female in the picture...but I guess I wont know.

heres the tank...and all the wood is sitting on big rocks providing caves all underneath for the others to have been able to hide.

t1.jpg
 
nice setup. I have a pair a p.yellow head "la Ceiba" in the tank with the pair of festae along with everything else I listed and some jewels. The male is the same size as the female but is terffied of her and everyone else. I'm worried one day I'm find the texas, bichir, or yellow heads dead. Right now I think the YH's would win, they have teeth and the male is bigger, the female is almost as big as the festae now. But they are shy and hid in the plants at the top of the tank unless I'm feeding.
 
Thanks!

Ahhh...nice! You have the la Ceiba's. I really like those. One thing I have noticed about parachromis is that all of them except the dovii, were hiders and not very social. I think by nature they are stalkers, so that would explain it. Unfortunately, because a female freddi is one of my favorite, the freddis were the worst. They would hide anytime the light was on and I could only coax them out with big live shrimp. Anything else and they either wouldnt eat or wait until the lights went out. it got to the point that I would wait until I went to bed to feed them so that I knew they were eating.

I sure hope you dont come home to anything dead, I like your selection of fish, especially if you can have them all living together. Both wild caught, my festae were never the "terrors" everyone says until they paired up (except instances of conspecific aggression where the male killed 3 different females on separate occasions).

wow...I remember your tank, having looked at your pics. i was throughly impressed with your oscar tank when you did it. GREAT job with that. I kept pictures of it when you originally posted it trying to improvise something of the sort for one of my tanks.

pretty ingenious water changer too, no matter what the rude commenters said. It was a great idea!

oh..and sstromerson...sorry for hijacking your thread. Hopefully some of the convo will help you with your dilemma or at least give you ideas for tankmates!
 
Thanks, I got rid of all the oscars but one and that's where everyone is living (I forgot to list the oscar). My male is wild caught but I don't think the female is. She's a bully, 2nd only to the texas. She's much friendlier to me, he hides constanely. Sh'e ready to breed with the catfish, he couldn't be bothered and I'm happy about it. The yellow heads have not been interested in breeding since I moved them and that makes me happy too. I don't know how long it's going to work, they're all in the 6-8" range right now. I'm figuring I'll be ok until someone wants to breed.

lol hopefully our hijack will be of use to the OP.
 
Well its cool that youre able to have them all in one tank with no breeding behavior. That makes for a complete looking tank...until they decide lol.
 
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