How can I encourage my convicts to eat their young?

[Thalassa]

If you can convince yourself that keeping your fish in a terrified state to encourage egg-eating is an ethical thing to do...and while I'm sure that this kind of psychological abuse would probably work...bear in mind that as soon as things settle down again, the female will lay another clutch and the cycle will repeat. Producing a clutch of eggs is a physically taxing biological exercise, and she will be doing it much more frequently if she never has the chance to tend the eggs and the young.

If you don't want a pair of fish to breed, you could...gee, I don't know...separate them? Just sayin'...

If only it were that simple...

Monogamous fish found to show pessimistic bias when separated from mate

A team of researchers at the University of Burgundy has found that a certain type of monogamous female fish exhibits a pessimistic bias when separated from its mate. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes experiments they conducted with convict...

phys.org

I think I will just scramble the eggs or suck out the wigglers and give them to my acara, which also seems ****ty but the lesser of all evils

 

[jjohnwm]

Yes...it really is that simple...

Careful...who knows how pessimistic those poor fish may become if they see their brood being "scrambled". Why don't you let them raise the fry up a bit before using them as feeders? That way the female will at least get a bit of a break from being an egg factory. She might even develop a grateful bias towards you.

Those researchers have made a truly momentous discovery: that living creatures whose natural instincts are being gratified are more content than others whose instincts go unfulfilled. My, what brilliant scientists they are!

I wonder what else they would discover about convict cichlids if they actually studied convicts instead of the severums shown in the photo?

 

[Thalassa]

Yes...it really is that simple...

Careful...who knows how pessimistic those poor fish may become if they see their brood being "scrambled". Why don't you let them raise the fry up a bit before using them as feeders? That way the female will at least get a bit of a break from being an egg factory. She might even develop a grateful bias towards you.

Those researchers have made a truly momentous discovery: that living creatures whose natural instincts are being gratified are more content than others whose instincts go unfulfilled. My, what brilliant scientists they are!

I wonder what else they would discover about convict cichlids if they actually studied convicts instead of the severums shown in the photo?

So let the fry mentally develop before I feed the alive to other fish?

 

[Hybridfish7]

If you can convince yourself that keeping your fish in a terrified state to encourage egg-eating is an ethical thing to do...and while I'm sure that this kind of psychological abuse would probably work...bear in mind that as soon as things settle down again, the female will lay another clutch and the cycle will repeat. Producing a clutch of eggs is a physically taxing biological exercise, and she will be doing it much more frequently if she never has the chance to tend the eggs and the young.

If you don't want a pair of fish to breed, you could...gee, I don't know...separate them? Just sayin'...

I mean fish get scared during WCs all the time, hence why I don't do thorough WCs during the first month of my fish having fry. The time frame between of doing thorough waterchanges should fall in line with the cycle of time it takes for a female to produce and lay another batch of eggs.
Or what I should've put before, leave the fry with the parents, let the fry mature, and let them eat their younger siblings as their parents produce them. That slows the cycle of each batch to about one new batch every two months or so.

 

[jjohnwm]

So let the fry mentally develop before I feed the alive to other fish?

Bingo. Try to feed them before they reach university-level mental acuity; the brains are more tender that way.

Being humane does not equate to keeping every living being alive until it dies of old age. Feeding the fry alive to larger fish is a relatively quick demise, during which they would likely suffer less stress than adult fish that are regularly terrorized into eating their young. Personally, I would not feed them alive; they can be quickly euthanized with ice water and then frozen for later use.

I mean fish get scared during WCs all the time, hence why I don't do thorough WCs during the first month of my fish having fry. The time frame between of doing thorough waterchanges should fall in line with the cycle of time it takes for a female to produce and lay another batch of eggs.
Or what I should've put before, leave the fry with the parents, let the fry mature, and let them eat their younger siblings as their parents produce them. That slows the cycle of each batch to about one new batch every two months or so.

Have you ever tried that with convicts? Give it a go and post up the results.

 

[Hybridfish7]

Bingo. Try to feed them before they reach university-level mental acuity; the brains are more tender that way.

Being humane does not equate to keeping every living being alive until it dies of old age. Feeding the fry alive to larger fish is a relatively quick demise, during which they would likely suffer less stress than adult fish that are regularly terrorized into eating their young. Personally, I would not feed them alive; they can be quickly euthanized with ice water and then frozen for later use.




Have you ever tried that with convicts? Give it a go and post up the results.

Yes, that's what I'm going off of, I'm going off what I see in all the convict type things I have