Severums
- Thread starter andy1985
- Start date
How big is the tank? I'd think that if you add more severums, they will end up being the focus of your breeding pair and will get picked on quite a bit. The best way to stop the breeding is to remove one of the sevs to another tank.
Yeah once breeding not much you can do except take on of the pair out. The breeding pair is unlikely to accept any other severum in their territory and would bully a new one.
Once they are paired up, nothing will stop them from breeding except putting them in different tanks. They will even breed through dividers.
Unfortunately, an egg-eating pleco or catfish won't be of much help. It will keep you from getting tons of fry but they will still be aggressive all the time, and will keep trying to breed over and over again. Also, they tend to take it on each other when their eggs/fry disappear overnight... when I moved my Salvini pair recently from the pond (they had fry that I couldn't move with em) the male got incredibly aggressive and beat up the female badly, I had to separate her for a week or so to keep him from killing her.
Unfortunately, an egg-eating pleco or catfish won't be of much help. It will keep you from getting tons of fry but they will still be aggressive all the time, and will keep trying to breed over and over again. Also, they tend to take it on each other when their eggs/fry disappear overnight... when I moved my Salvini pair recently from the pond (they had fry that I couldn't move with em) the male got incredibly aggressive and beat up the female badly, I had to separate her for a week or so to keep him from killing her.
Agreed with all of this.
My wild notatus pair breeds weekly in my 150 gallon and they keep all the other fish crammed into one half of the tank. At night, my rhino pleco eats the eggs, but the fish still stay in territorial mode for a few days, then rest a few days, then go right back into spawning mode and do it all again.
The best solution I've had with SA cichlids is to keep an all-male tank where the males can hang out. The aggression stays fairly low without the presence of a female. If I want to spawn the fish, I can just move the males into the tanks where the females are and I usually have eggs within a week or two. If you leave the pairs in the tank together, they are going to continue spawning. Even dividing the tank will not work because the fish will spawn on each side of the divider.