Update on Umbee's and Wolf's

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Jack Dempsey
MFK Member
Sep 22, 2005
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Seattle Area
As some of you know i had bought 3 umbri's and 3 wolf's about 1 month ago and put each trio in 38gallon... My goal is to try to get a male of each batch for my 180 and 240...Last night i came home from work and the big 3.5" umbee has already killed the smaller of the other 2 @ about 2.5 inches. So now i'm down to 2 left hoping the biggest is a male. The wolf's range from 3"-4" and although they constantly lock jaws i've had no deaths as of yet. Next monday i'm moving the biggest umbri and the 3 wolf's into the 180 with 5 - 5" Tinfoil Barbs to try to speed up their growth....
 
good luck, i hope your last umbee is a male, but aren't they harder to get?
 
Yeah they are extremely hard to get, i know people that have raised more then 15 and got all female's. My advantage though is that i work at a large fish store on the weekends and when we got in a batch of about 50 umbri's i hand picked the biggest 3 and the one i have that killed the other was damn near twice the size of all 50 that they got. So considering males usually grow at a faster rate i hope its a male....
 
Good luck. Mine is a female. When you decide to transfer the fish do you think it would be wise to introduce the umbee first? That’s what I would do. Dovii’s are becoming more and more common. But Male Umbee’s are always going to be hard to get. So do not let this one die.
 
how do you tell the difference between the sex's in umbee?
 
The dorsal fin is one way you can tell. Another way you can find out is by posting the pix on here. sometimes you can tell the sex of an umbee when there 2-3 inches by color, size, body shape. a picture would be the best way tho.
 
I believe that the only way to tell at that smal 2-3" is to see the individual umbee with the rest of its fry siblings but even this doesn't guarantee you anything. Unless you have the proper equipment to vent the fish they near impossible to sex until they reach at least 5"....And even then it can be tricky. Just go and find a post on here about sexing and umbee and you will see how many people argue its sex. Its pretty much a waiting game until 5+".....But once they get around this size the usual signs for females are slower growth rate to get that size and dark blotching that starts to occur in the front of the dorsal fin.
 
At 3", very tough to tell. I know of someone's female who never displayed the black dorsal until 12"!! My female (dominant of the group) didn't display hers until around 6.5" TL. She had pretty spangles and bronze face, very deceiving. She did have a sort of dull golden/brownish background color where the juvenile male seems to be more of a slight reddish/purple as shown below from Mojo's site (male on left): You can also notice the male's extensions are slightly longer at the same age. But these traits appear when they around 5" or so.
125630105.jpg

The female will look like this in battle (turn bright yellow and black dorsal) and also when breeding as shown from Jeff's photo below:
umbie.fem.jpg
 
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