Okay, just finished with my first cichlid tank. wanted some cheap colorful ones to cycle my tank with. bought some realtivly inexpensive ones out of the "assorted african cichlid" tank. my reaseach leads me to beleive these are "Lake Malawi" cichlids. anyone have any advice on keeping them. been keeping tropical for years these are a little new to me so im just throwing this out there. I want to post some pic's soon. I've collected tanks and equipment for a while and have ended up with some fnunky stuff. so i made a "Planet Mars" tank, and set these guys up in it.
New cichlid help and info please.....
- Thread starter Jay R.
- Start date
Yeah, they're from Lake Malawi in East Africa and therefore require hard alkaline water with a pH of 8.5. They also need LOTS of rock piles otherwise they will beat the crap out of each other and you will certainly end up with some dead fishes. To buffer the water, use crushed coral and coral sand as a substrate. If that is not done, your pH will drop dangerously low gradually, due to metabolic by-products such as fish wastes and uneaten food. All this cause pH levels to fall.
okay, sound like my tap water will be good for them, i have to drop the PH for my tropicals. this raises another question..... time for a new thread!!!!
Don't mess with your pH, ever. Unless it drops to 5 or something. lol.
read this
http://www.piranha-fury.com/pfury/index.php?showtopic=67979
and take it to heart because 2 professional ichthyologists answered it.
Moral of the thread? pH is vastly overrated. Keep your pH the same as your tapwater and you will save both yourself and your fish a great deal of stress and trouble.
Feed your malawi cichlids whatever you feed your other fish; pellets worms whatever.
here's a good site for ID'ing african cichlids, if you care to do so:
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/species_profiles.php
read this
http://www.piranha-fury.com/pfury/index.php?showtopic=67979
and take it to heart because 2 professional ichthyologists answered it.
Moral of the thread? pH is vastly overrated. Keep your pH the same as your tapwater and you will save both yourself and your fish a great deal of stress and trouble.
Feed your malawi cichlids whatever you feed your other fish; pellets worms whatever.
here's a good site for ID'ing african cichlids, if you care to do so:
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/species_profiles.php
my tank is mostly tanganikan but i do have a d. compresicep which is malawi.
they get along just fine. i do have plenty of hiding places for the smaller fish. it is a happy little tank
they get along just fine. i do have plenty of hiding places for the smaller fish. it is a happy little tank
site isn't comming up. why no mess with the PH? once i have the tank set every thing stays in perameters. my tap water is somewhere around 8.4 usually. the tropicals are "supposed " to have 7.6, your saying it ain't such a big deal? didn't think it was for survival. never lost a fish to wrong PH, but they says theres a difference between surviving and thriving, I always thout things like that was where the difference is made. I try to keep everything right but i don't stress over it.
Many Lake Malawi cichlids eat aufwuchs (algae), and they get dropsy (Malawi Bloat) easily from a high-protein diet, so avoid feeding meaty food like worms, prawns and high-protein pellets. Give them vegetable pellets/flake and some peas and lettuce; your cichlids will love you for it. BTW, dropsy is extremely difficult to treat, if not impossible. I'm sure you don't want to lose any fish, so heed my advice.
piranha45, are you saying that pH is inimportant? A fish living in soft acidic water in the wild will most probably die if put in hard alkaline water. Malawi cichlids do REQUIRE hard alkaline water. And, as I mentioned earlier, many Malawi cichlids graze algae from rocks; too much protein will give them dropsy and inevitably, death. If you don't have good advice, don't post. And stop giving others wrong information. If a newbie who has just bought some Malawi cichlids he/she will think 'Since he says feed them the same food as my other fish, and my other fish eat feeders and earthworms and the like, I shall feed them those!'. When his/her cichlids die, you will probably be held responsible. Don't say things you are not sure of, please.
i think he's saying its not an exacting spec like the other parameters, amonia, nitrites and nitrates. and you can do more harm than good if you try to hard to get it right. and could stress the fish out in the process. thats all it sounds like to me.
