I was arguing with this guy today..........

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golcondorus

Feeder Fish
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Mar 22, 2006
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so i was arguing with this guy today that absolutlly insisted that when a female green terror lays her first batch of eggs, she will never grow any larger than she already is.
is that true/anyone else here of this? Im sure intense breeding at young ages could stunt growth but it just didnt sound right to me that every female automatically stops growing the very first time she lays eggs. opinions on this??????????
 
I used to breed Gt's and never came across the problem that guy was telling you. My female continued to grow. It is a good idea to give females a break though as they will continue to make batch after batch of eggs and it will slow their growth down.
 
Yeah, It didnt sound right to me but I can, on ocassion be wrong, so I thought I would ask our league of fish keepers on here


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fish truely never stop growing.they may grow extremely slow but they never stop. gravity does not effect them. at least thats what i saw on hooked on national geographic...
 
It's applicable to pretty much all cichlids, really. If they start spawning when small and continuously spawn, then they won't really grow. So yeah, if his green terror happened to spawn continuously, he might have never noticed her growing any larger than she was. Perhaps the fish was still growing, but to him it was imperceptible. XD
 
As everybody's been saying the GT will keep growing, but slower if continuously bred. Breeding takes a lot out of a fish and of course as that which is sustaining her is being divided between her and her developing spawn of course during that time their growth will be slowed.
 
I think Mo posted that his experience was: females who are permitted to begin spawning at a young age never attain their full potential size, when compared with those who grow out completely before spawning.
(I am going by memory, didn't look for the exact wording of that post.)
so, it's not that they instantly stop growing & never get any bigger.
it's that they won't get as big as they would have.

I don't recall if one spawn makes a difference, or if it was females spawning repeatedly.
 
Azedenkae said:
It's applicable to pretty much all cichlids, really. If they start spawning when small and continuously spawn, then they won't really grow. So yeah, if his green terror happened to spawn continuously, he might have never noticed her growing any larger than she was. Perhaps the fish was still growing, but to him it was imperceptible. XD
Click to expand...

How do you know this? What species is this observation based on? Do you have negative controls?

I've picked pairs out from a group and spawned them when they were young. Compared to the rest of the group that didn't get to spawn, there was absolutely no difference in growth later. I've seen this with miltiple species. Given proper care, the effect of spawning activity on growth is neglectable.
 
Fish exhibit what is referred to as "indeterminate growth" which means they don't grow to a certain size. Their size at death is determined by a number of factors (diet, temp, O2, hormone concentrations, ammonia, et cetera). While breeding at a young age could possibly affect the maximum adult size to some degree, I don't believe it necessarily would.

This is a nice, simple presentation on indeterminate growth:
http://www.biol.ttu.edu/faculty/gwilde/Shared Documents/Growth.pdf
 
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