ryanjury

Sounds good your giraffes may outgrow that tank and if you end up with 2 males of all of those species ou may have fights but im sure they will have enough room to hide.. As for what else to add, maybe demasoni, more male peacocks or dragonsbloods and one other species that has brown females, these fish will all cross breed so no babies should be sold from your tank, but because all the females are different colours so it will enable you to separate them later on to breed them in their own tank. You could also add some more of the fish you already have, maybe more yellows as they always look good in groups. They will be impossible to sex at those sizes. Good to see you've visited Alex he has some awesome fish and breeds them right unlike others you will see around. His huge display is awesome! Good luck glad to see another hooked by the african bug

Hi and welcome maybe someone could move this to the cichlids section of the forums What sizes and sexes are your fish? More importantly what size is your tank and filter?

Double post sorry got to have more patience...

Looking good Glad it all went well.. You can stick the filter outlet and inlet at opposite ends it would improve water circulation ie the filters not just sucking up new filtered water again and also gives good flow for the heaters to heat it all etc. If the ph is 7.5 and stable dont stress about it you'll stress yourself and your fish more trying to get it down and stable.

Man thats awesome.. How many tanks will you have in there when its done? How many at the moment! Congrats it looks like a great setup!

Should add that is 2.27kg's of the cichlid-formula I didn't look into the growth formula.

I know you can import 2.27kg for around $110 so would expect 3kg to be around the $150 mark.

I might also add I almost cringe when I see a shop with central filtration with the number of fish they have coming through and the amount of stress the fish are under they are guaranteed to have some sort of disease problems which will spread.

If you run a central filtration system you run all those risks.. But if you do the right thing ie have seperate q-tine tanks and q-tine all new fish for a couple of months before adding them to the system you shouldn't have problems. As long as you have a heap of media for bacteria and cycle all the tanks well it shoud be a good system its alot harder for an ammonia spike to reach dangerous levels when you have a couple of thousand litres.. As for your initial question I have no idea how to run it all I have often considered it but have put it into the too hard basket. Could you run some sort of regulator in each return to keep the flows constant regardless of the number of tanks in the system? Or have a bleed off somewhere that goes back into the sump you can adjust to get the flow right..

lol yeah I think I might have got some from the same source awesome fish Yeah we wont live forever and at the end of the day you make no more friends or money or anything from doing it well the only thing I get out of it is breeding descent fish and hopefully someone being happy with what they've brought Hopefully there are always people in NZ who will keep them pure as eventually the lake may get closed and the only thing we will have is whats already in the country which is why I think we need to keep them pure. I guess it doesn't bother you as your not breeding just keeping a nice male only display tank.

Awesome yeah ive got baenshi and jacob's too Baenshi had their first spawn the other day the male is awesome and jacob is colouring up.. Did you get some off the latest list?

That would never happen as there are plenty of people (me included) who have a number of tanks and breed peacocks in their own species tanks I know of at least 9 of them without thinking very hard, not to mention most of our stocks are imported or bred by one of the wholesalers

Thats awesome Gem what you keeping now Lionheads are one thing I want to get going I have 2 huge males might have to bite the bullet and get a heap of young ones to grow out and get some girls Anna&chris sorry to have come off so mean I just feel very strongly on this point and people naming or breeding peacocks

lol that is a good point But if someone like me brought it like I was going to to breed from it would have sucked.. I guess thats all a descent id is good for.. I do keep and breed the line bred hybrids dragons bloods, ob's etc but I was under no misconceptions when I brought them and with all my peacocks breed them in species tanks so there are no problems. All in all if your not breed from them then it doesn't matter, my only concern is if they aren't chilumba and people breed and sell them they could get crossed with the other chilumba's and it could be another species ruined in NZ. Obviously thats pretty extreme. Either way if they're for display and they look good then enjoy them

Theres nothing to say that at all There are all sorts of things floating around the country that shouldn't be here and that some people have no idea about.. However they are very few and far between im just saying her fish look more like royal blues to me but who is to say the royal blues I have seen aren't chilumba's because someone else misnamed them?

You can call me what you want But im trying my best to breed descent well identified fish, and I was about to kill all the babies from those batches until a friend who is right into her africans and knows what she's doing came over and saw them and agreed with my identifiication, I got a batch of them grown out and the males were the same as the male parent, females all had straight bars etc etc.. End of the day im just glad that I didn't bid on your auction and buy some of these to get a female to breed with my male as I would have been gutted as they grew out and I realized they weren't chilumba's. People will id and call their fish what they want I guess, and I guess its just knowing who to buy them off

Good point Difference with them is 1.) Maleri golds are in the country, when chilumba's weren't when she purchased the parents. 2.) Batches of babies have been grown out and coloured up the same as parents before they were sold as such. 3.) Red shoulders and maleri gold are completly different fish so I wasn't just changing the name for nothing.

No I was just saying that I get sick of people doing what you have done, chilumbas are very new in nz you said you got yours pretty much unidentified 6-7years ago and they dont look like the chilumba's I have (your pic may be bad but from the looks of it to me the fish is a different shape). Things like this make peacocks in NZ get all muddled up and dilute the fish stocks here and confuse people, technically unless you got the fish with a speciffic name from a descent breeder or direct off the wholesale list bagged (not mixed with other peacocks in a shop tank) you cant really id them just going around saying they look like your mates fish which is this or that wont cut it as the females could have been anything. Anyway rant over I just dont like to see people ripped off like I was when someone did the same to me. To breed and sell them you really have to know what you have otherwise you have to sell them as "blue peacocks" and no name because you don't actually know what it is..

The point of discussing is you renamed your royal blue a chilumba, chilumba's have only just come into the country, whereas your royal blues were purchased 6-7years ago. I dont care as I wont touch them now but I feel for the people who have purchased the fish off you already and maybe paid too much for royal blues if I had purchased them I would be angry. Bottom line is you brought them as royal blues (you think) unless they obviously aren't then thats what they should stay. I could just change the names of any of my juvvie uncoloured peacocks to the "in" peacock to try and get a few more $$ but to me thats ripping people off. End of the day your fish to me are dead ringers of royal blues which are still nice fish so im confused as to why you decided to call them chilumba's?

Cant offer much advice on this one sorry man, I hope your fish make it though, ive still got to make it out to see you and your fish and maybe buy some if you've got any for sale. As for something to sterilize your tank, try bleach (rinse well) or really concentrated salty water for a while.. Good luck!

Keep using both filters if you can then the filters will be cycled for the amount of fish although if one of them is big enough it may take over the extra load.. I would do as you suggested keep some of the water from each tank and top up with fresh water that way both lots of fish adjust to the same water and its all good. Good luck

You could probably stick it with all of those fish if you wanted it is the same old water preferences thing that is the problem but fish adjust depends if your a purist or just down with whatever. He could probably go with giraffes provided they aren't bite sized for him I haven't actually kept these I just did research on them and considered getting some over a year ago now but decided not to risk my peacocks and stuff

They can live with electric yellow's bear in mind anything small enough to be considered food will be food, they have big mouths and can grow to be big fish.. http://www.cichlid-forum.com/profiles/s ... hp?id=1062 http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/d ... siceps.php

Yeah ive got a male from Ken too which is different to the one that anna&chris have in the photo. To me the one that anna&chris has looks like a royal blue especially considering thats what it was brought as 6-7years ago.. They are very similair though both being blue all over. Who knows im just saying that there is no point in changing what you've brought a fish as and selling it, if you buy a fish as royal blue and nothing about it isn't royal blue why change what you call them and sell them, now everyone who breeds from those fish will sell them as chilumba's when they're not and it leads to confusion down the line..

I have seen alot of id's on here and on trademe with people going through there and matching up fish that aren't in NZ or photos that look nothing like their fish.. It is a good place to start though