Our fish population more than doubled today - not the best timing as we may be moving soon, but they are so cute! These guys are Aulonocara stuartgranti cichlids - Peacock Cichlids from Lake Malawi in Africa. The females stay a drab brown color, while the dominant male turns gorgeous shades of blue and yellow. They are mouthbrooders - when the male and female court, the female lays her eggs on a smooth rock, then pecks at the male's dorsal fin. He fertilizes the eggs, and she picks them back up in her mouth where they hatch about two weeks later. They would stay there, and gradually start to leave her mouth. We flush them out, where they can grow in a baby net until they are big enough to be released into the tank. These guys came from two mamas. One is a younger first time female - she had 7 babies. The other is our oldest female - she looked huge, but I didn't think there were 40 in there!
This is the male in a quart jar to give an idea of his size. I love that blue!
3 comments:
Those colors are so brilliant. 47, is that right? Wow. What will you do with all of them?
Actually, there are 49 or 50. Some were hiding under the camera. We aren't quite sure what to do with them - Nate said that he knows how the people in 101 dalmations felt now! Does Mila want some fish?
LOL! Wow, that's a lot of little fishies. Maybe a pet store will want some of them.......
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