School me on Black Belt Cichilds pleeze!

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nospeed411

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Aug 13, 2009
96
1
0
Central PA
I am just wandering how mean these fish really are. Do they really bully other bully fish such as JD?????
 
Yes they are pretty agressive. my 12-13'' male stands up to my 13'' jag all the time. luckily they have been together forever and it never gets too serious. I dont think a jd would have a chance with him.
 
They are pretty much oscars, same temperament, same size, same requirements. But these guys are more active, therefore they need a bigger tank than the generic standard 55g automatically assigned to oscars, oscars deserve much bigger but people are stubborn. Just feed the a varied diet of hikari pellets, blood worms, night crawlers, crickets and krill.
 
similar personality as oscars, very personable but way more aggressive and intollerant of tank mates. the black sheep of the vieja family.
 
this thing can kill your Oscars any day of the week, so not the same, my male at 25cms tried to kill my 30 cms male devil:screwy:


Linoleum;3628176; said:
similar personality as oscars, very personable but way more aggressive and intollerant of tank mates. the black sheep of the vieja family.
 
not trying to say this just to play devil's advocate here, but there are some references that have referred to black belts as "gentle giants" among the CA cichlids...so basically it does boil down to individual fish, with the probability of the fish being aggressive being most likely
 
These can be some of the more aggressive of the Vieja types. They grow very large too, so they can dominate even some of the more aggressive CA's in certain situations.
 
I kept a male with a breeding pair of zhen zhu flowerhorns. The male fh and male bb were around 10" and they constanlty battled. Needles to say the blackbelt never had a scratch on him. Neither did the fh. The bb always stood his ground. I ended up selling the male fh and after about 5 days the bb killed my female fh. I've kept jd's and they seem to be very tough but not so agressive. My experience with a bb proved that they were WAY more agressive. Expecially if you keep them with other paratheraps or vieja types. I also had him in with a breeding pair of synspilus and he chased both of them nonstop.
 
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