more babies

Normally, I don’t get this excited about my pets, but the baby fish really made my day so I am posting a few more images.

These are the parent fish.

The female is the top fish while the male is the bottom fish (closer to the right). They made their nest underneath the driftwood in the picture.

You can kind of see why kribs are called the Purple Cichlid sometimes. These fish are from tropical freshwater in Africa.

I tried very hard to take a picture of the babies, but they are no bigger than a coarse grain of sea salt. Nevertheless, if you look closely at the picture to the left, the gray dots below the father fish are the babies. To give you an idea of size, the father fish is about 2.5″ in length.

I know most of the little fry won’t survive, but it is very exciting to have the little guys, even if I end up only with a handful of adults out of the group.

As I said, I love watching my fish exhibiting their parental behavior. They herd the babies and even lovingly carry them in their mouths. This is a far cry from my horribly inbred angelfish (also cichlids) who devoured their eggs as soon as they laid them because all of their parental skills had been bred out of them to get fancy fins.

babies!

My kribs had babies! This has happened before, but every time it happens, it kind of is a thrill for me. (Life created in my room!)

For the past week or so, my kribs have been terrorizing the other fish in the tank. (Kribs are cichlids, so they are pugnacious by nature.) They also were becoming very reclusive and the female’s colors were becoming very deep and beautiful. She and the male have been hanging around a piece of driftwood a lot. Well, it turns out they had eggs, so they had an excuse to be nasty. Yesterday when I turned on the aquarium light, the parents were corralling a large brood of fry.

(That’s the male. My apologies, I’m not a very good underwater photographer — yet.)

This is the third time my kribs have had babies. Last time, several of the fry grew into beautiful adults that I was able to give away. I let the parents raise the babies. Part of what makes keeping cichlids neat and rewarding as a fish keeper is getting to see them exhibit their parental behavior. Most fish will just eat their own eggs or young, but cichlids are known as excellent parents.

These are three of my kribs. The fish on the lower left is my breeding female. The fish in the middle and to the right are also Pelvicachromis Pulcher (now you understand why fish keepers call them Kribs!), but they are actually adults from my first successful breeding.