Hi T. Much appreciated when I got them the guy said they was zebra parrot An they do have similarity’s I just took them as young parrots. He was breeding them had a separate pair with fry so when he told me they was a breeding pair I assumed he knew what he was talking about. What are the HRP you mentioned? These are very perculiar behaviour I’m trying to upload a vid but it won’t allow me. It looks like breeding but then one looks like it is giving in to dominance. They defiantly have me confused. No I’m not on any fb pages too.
Basically some cichlids throw out a short body fish now and again, sort of like a dwarfism in humans. They sometimes have the funny mouth that parrots have too. The gene is recessive so you have to breed one to another short body to get short body fry. This is probably what the guy is doing. It's very common for people to have short body pink cons breeding and due to them resembling parrots, people will sell them as them (knowingly or unknowingly) short body striped cons are less common but do pop up now and then. As I said, yours look like HRPs (Honduran red point cichlid) which are a close relative of convicts. They are usuallty more blue but also can be sort of smokey looking with less defined stripes and also have red on the tail fin. Yours look at least part HRP, the other part more than likely being convict. I don't think they are parrot as breeding short body convict to a parrot yields infertile fish which look mostly like large chunky convicts. The fact the guy has a breeding pair suggests they are short body pure fish (or con crosses which are also fertile). I'm not 100% sure on sexing HRP as they are a little more variable than convicts. If you you can get the vid uploaded then maybe we can tell.
Here's a few vids of a HRP pairs.
HRP x convict
Short body convicts
And here's the pic I saw on FB. It looks a lot like your fish.