Lucky we have American Cichlids
- Thread starter AviB
- Start date
Japanese domestic market, comes from the car scene actually.
In fishkeeping, it means lots of big fish overstocked in relatively small tanks. Usually with no/minimal décor or substrate. Lots of people in asia keep fish like this.
Gourami Swami
displays his erudition yet again, thanks sir. I knew what it was just wasn't sure about what the letters actually stood for.
No its completely different.
All mbuna and Malawi haplachromines are maternal mouth brooders. This means a pair won't set up territory guarding a spawn site for weeks on end.
Most central American and South Americans are open or cave spawners. This means the territorial needs differ completely to those of mbuna, who don't form lasting pairs. With or without the opposite sex those instincts will still run strong in new world cichlids.
Most of the common African mbuna only reach 4 to 6 inches.
Housing say 30 of these to defuse aggressive behaviour still gives them plenty of swimming space. They will also produce less of a biolode on the system than 20 to 30 large new world cichlids.
You only need to watch footage of Lake Malawi to see just how many different species live in such close proximity to each other, their whole breeding strategy has evolved around this.
The exact opposite can be said for most new worlds. Space and separation is at the forefront of their instinctive erges.
Some c/a cichlids will defend a territory as big as a tennis court and some will defend an area of around 200 gallons.
New worlds are large, some are predators and put a considerable biolode strain on a system.
One other reason is, all African cichlids from the rift lakes share the exact same water chemistry and temp requirements.
I don't think we can say the same for the continental mix in the ops tanks.
Keeping Africans in a highly stocked tank is a much closer situation to how the fish live in the wild than mixing, veija, hero's, parachromis, cichla, amphilophus and tiger fish etc. A lot of these fish will have different preferences for pH and hardness and temperatures.
So it is different, very different
