Sex of my Monos
- Thread starter Steve86
- Start date
nice bass. feed it lots of good food and do regular water changes and they will probably breed for ya 
No Problem bud, here to help and share my experience. I have several breeding pairs of cichla now and one thing I have learned over trial and error is to soften the water up. I do this by adding Driftwood and loads of salt. Not table salt though…lol I buy my salt in 50lbs bags from Home Depot for only $4 a bag. It’s 99.999 pure natural salt, it’s the same exact salt they sell as “aquarium salt” in pet stores but waaaaaaay cheaper to buy at a building store vs a pet store in little cartons for $8 for 1lbs (huge rip off). I’m a strong believer in using salt and put salt into every tank / Pool I own. It does wonders for your fish. As far as using it in a tank where a pair is spawning though it helps the male fertilize the eggs loads better as the shells are so much more softer and his sperm packs a better punch leading to more eggs hatching. At first I was afraid to put a lot of salt into a tank with a breeding pair and so didn’t. My first few spawns turned out to be awful with over 5000 eggs laid by the female and only 20 that hatched.. Horrible odds…So I figured I better find out what was going on and why so little eggs where hatching… I tried many things over the next few spawns but still was getting the same outcome, it really sucked and I even began to think that maybe my males had low count sperm issues or something.. Long story short, I found the key was adding large pieces of driftwood in the tank and adding loads of salt. Once I did that I started seeing the results I was looking for with hundreds of fry hatching. To give you an idea of how much salt I use, I use 240 gallon tanks for breeding, I add 2 ½ cups of salt to one tank plus the drift wood. You don’t want to overdue the salt too much because then you risk that chance of dehydrating your fish. Basic rule of thumb is you can safely go 5-6 times over the amount that is recommend for fresh water fish. Also another benefit to using so much salt in all my tanks is I have NEVER had an outbreak of ich or anything else. all my fish are very happy and healthy.
