Hello again everyone!

For anyone who may have noticed, I've been pretty much absent from the forum for a few weeks because my cable company is having some very annoying technical issues with the internet connection where I live. I guess they are still ironing out some problems but as you can guess, I'm finially able to log in every once in a while.



Anyways, I was just catching up on the great discussions that I've been missing and was wondering how many of you have tried to breed any livestock and if so, do you have any tips or tactics that you could share with the rest of us.



Like a lot of people I guess, I started out by breeding livebearers (mollies and platties mostly), but I admit, I wasn't really trying to do so. Eventually I did buy another quaranteen tank and attempted to see if I could breed two fish of different colors to make a third but obviously "Tommy Gun Platties" aren't flying off store shelves yet. Also like just about everyone else, it turns out that snails love to breen in my tank but I wound up trading livebearers for cichlids a few years ago and bred a few different types of mbuna; including the P. Saulosi that have now over populated one of my tanks.


How about you?

I have had 4 cichlids in a 20 gallon tank, i know its a little crowded, i know one is a bumblebee one a jewel , the other two not sure one is all yellow and getting fairly big, and fourth is a black one with blue stripes. Anyways i need to look up what they are actually just bought a 55 gallon, with a filter for tanks up to 70 gallons and a bunch of driftwood that is soaking so that it will eventually sink. Im going to start cycling the tank tomorrow with goldfish, but im hoping to get a few more cichlids and try my luck at breeding them, i plan on using the 20 gallon tank as a quarenteen tank, and possibly even my moms 10 gallon tank if needed as well, both the 20 and 10 are fully cycled and have been going strong for a while, I am just sorta lost with even the basics like with cichlids interbreed, and obviously trying to distinguish males and females, petsmart and petco dont know any of that stuff, possibly a nicer fish store would otherwise any tips at all.
Thanks, and on top of that if your removing hte female and you have about 20 frey grow up, do you sell them/give them away? What do you do with em all.

Hey Dj-lucky,

I'm sure if you could post some pictures, we would be able to help you out with the IDs. It may be hard to give a whole lot of general advice for breeding cichlids because it would depend on what cichlids you are talking about...for example, I think you would want to find a pair of jewel cichlids to breed, where as you probably want to have one male and several female bumble bee cichlids.

If you have established aquariums, you might be able to skip cycling with the goldfish by cloning the new tank from the others. You can do that by placing some of the filter media you are using on the established tanks in the new filter. It should be a lot faster, almost certainly, less stressful on any of your fish, and shouldn't cause any problems for those established tanks either.