Some fishy photos...

Some random photos of some of the inhabitants of my tanks. I'll continue to upload to this thread as I get more decent enough shots.

55 and 29

Young festivum cichlid


The old lady, one of my first cichlids ever. She's laid eggs a couple times even though she was the only festivum in the tank. These of course became cichlid caviar for other fish.


Lamp. Speciosus

Young Altolamp. Compressiceps fire fin. 99% sure this is a male as he is extremely dominant, and pretty much king of the tank.


Eretmodus (goby cichlid) most active eretmodus I've owned

 

Now the compressiceps should eventually look like this


I remember you telling me you had a bad experience with them before, but I can't remember what exactly happened and what types of cichlids they were? I had some evil evil fish in my 90 gal for a little while... Pseudotropheus demasoni. Beautiful beautiful blue and black cichlids....but evil! They started killing my other fish.

With guppies, you could probably keep some of the calmer south Americans. Geophagus, gymnogeophagus, etc. though with either of those you would need a 55+ gallon tank and south americans are still cichlids, so they could become aggressive and you're pretty likely to never see guppy fry again lol

 

Looking at those pics, it definitely looks like you had a whole bunch of mbuna and labs, of which I can't remember the names, but the species you had were all super aggressive mbuna. The only one I see in those pics that would be on the mild side looks to be a melanochromis exasperatus. I had one of those until a demasoni killed it... The only mbuna I have right now is a cynotilapia afra cobue. He has never killed anyone, but he's definitely on the aggressive side and sometimes bullies the other fish around.
On the topic of cichlids, having never owned them, I'm just curious if discus ever show any aggression being that they are a type of cichlid as well? I can't picture a discus being mean lol

 

An interesting side by side. The top is my altolamp. Compressiceps (tanganyika) and the bottom is my female Hap. Compressiceps (Malawi) in my 90 gal. Now this is all theoretical, but there was a great photo I found online that showed side by side comparisons of fish from tanganyika and from Malawi and how their evolution was so similar whether it was coloration, body shape, etc. and yet the lakes are completely unconnected.

 

Hbic, this is true.
As for the fish, I love what I have but I think I need to get some bright colors going on, at least in the 90 gal. The tangs and south Americans are all rather drab, and the brightest fish I have in the 90 is my male Haplochromis obliquiden. Horrible picture but this is what he looks like

Dawn, that definitely either sounds like a mating hormonal thing or a territory issue. Very interesting though..

 

Love messing with these apps on my iPhone lol

 

Just picked up a new Plakat Betta

 

MasterBlue: They had a really pretty dark blue double tail plakat when I got the red one. Have you ever seen a black betta? I finally saw one today. Very cool looking fish!

On to a couple more pics. Picked these two guys up today.... Altolamp. Comp. Mwela orange. I'm hoping it's a male and female as they will be at breeding size sooner than the other comps. and I'm dying to see baby altolamps! Lol Eventually I'm going to have to decide who I want to keep in this tank and who's going to be transferred to another tank. The pics look horrible and I will get better ones once they are used to the tank.

Hopeful female on the left. Good comparison shot next to the original fire fin on the right.


This one has got to definitely be a male (top). Quite a bit bigger than the hopeful female, and has a much more slanted head.

 

So I changed some things around in the 29. I grabbed some of my old live rock from two years ago when the 90 gal was a reef tank in progress. I soaked it for a while to make sure any salt that might still be in it after sitting out in the rain and snow for two years would be cleaned out. I forgot a piece i wanted to add to it outside, so that will be going in tonight.
Yes that's a baby food container on the right (which was actually a good idea as its used by one compressiceps or another), and yes those are rainbow fish in the center (though I'm thinking they are going into the 55 and im going to get some smaller rainbows as this species of rainbow makes a horrible dither fish... Lol) and you can see the Christmas wrapping paper as a background (cheapmans way of covering the back lol).

 

I went to another LFS the other day, and picked up what was labeled as a "black calvus". After I got him home, I'm looking at him and I'm thinking "there is no way this is a calvus, the body shape doesn't match and it definitely isn't black. Come to find out it is a compressiceps of some type. Still a big beautiful fish and definitely a keeper, but not what I wanted...that'll teach me for not waiting for Ned's to get some in... Lol

New guy hanging out with a mwela orange


Smiling pretty for the camera


Also my new lamprologus brevis kvala pair