young convict sexing

[davew]

i got a bunch of young black convicts from my lfs i only want to keep a pair and will give the rest back to the shop, at the moment i have about 15 the biggest are about 1.5"
the strange thing is there are about 3 which are growing much faster than the rest which i would have thought would be males but they are showing orange colour on there bellys.
i'm a bit puzzled because if they are indeed females that means that they are growing much faster than the males, they also seem to be the most dominant one in the tank.
is it possibly for male to have orange colour

 

[Babyangel1985]

I've never heard of males having orange. Its just the female who has orange on the stomach.

 

[davew]

thats what i thought that only the females had the orange ,it just seems strange the the ones with orange are growing faster than the others.

 

[maxcow]

Babyangel1985, that would be a negative. The males are the one who have an orange-gold spot on their belly but that will not show until they are older. There are really no ways of sexing them until they get a little older. In your case you have at least one male. I would not be surprised to see that all your females get much larger than your males. I have one female who is a MONSTER! she is 7'' long and most my other females are bigger than my males. When they are older your females will have much darker, slighly wider bands then the males.

 

[love The Jack Dempseys]

Only females have orange and they almost always grow bigger and faster than males, but thats only when they are in captivity. In the wild males get much bigger like around 6 or 7 inches and they look alot better.

 

[jonclark96]

I'd like to see a pic of a 7" female convict.

Only the females have the orange on the belly.

 

[CClump]

not a single one of my females has grown faster than the males, or larger for that matter.
Also even at a at least a year old none of my males have any orange on their stomachs.
Ive seen much larger 5" + male ones with no orange.

I will say that the females tend to be much more aggressive, especially during breeding

 

[Inglorious]

My females grew to full size much faster than my males have, but now they're significantly smaller. When they're getting to lay eggs they're also much more aggressive than their partners too.

 

[Peacock Rey]

Only females have orange....and the males grow a bit bigger

 

[davew]

thats what i thought that only females had orange and the all the pictures i've seen the male are larger but my females are much larger than the males, maybe there growth will slow and the male will catch up