Reply To: Chris’ African/mbuna Journal
well one thing is, you can do what ever, but an under gravel filter is gonna end up being a pain, because these cichlids dig, jus like the rest of them. the egg crate is a good idea and all but fish aren’t going to move the rocks, some ppl. like the crate but if you stack your rocks in away that the gravel isn’t supporting tottally don’t even bother. get your foundation rocks close to the bottom glass and you should be fine. the thing with demasoni is that you either go with one or a dozen or more, see these fish are very tettorial and if you have less than a dozen or so they are gonna kill each other off. i kno so take my word for it. i have like 20 or so and they are doing good. 12 sounds like a bit to much, but it’s a general guide line for these fish. Demasoni and labs are very very very hard to sex at young ages so obtaining m/f ratio is difficult. labs ratio doesn’t really matter but later on with the demasoni you may need to weed out some of exta males.
you can try something else besides mbuna tho, shell dwellers, stay small and are coolest lil fish and they stay mostly to the bottom and your size tank would be great for them. most mbuna get pretty large so you need to think long term and not cute lil baby fish.
if your gonna stick with mbuna with your tank, i would jus go with demasoni and labs maybe 12 demasoni and 4-6 labs. or go with a variety of diff. fish and research the size of grown adults.
breeding fish is cool and all but sometimes you need to set up a tank for yourself and just enjoy it. an all male peacock tank is popular but they are a tangynikan fish, or however you spell it,
telling ya go to cichlid-forum.com and see whats up, plenty of advice and all info you need. but look into that shell dwellers, they have quite interesting behavior. so loose the UG filter and good luck.
any more questions jus post