#Red zebra cichlid lifespan free#
The good news about mbuna is that although there are so many species, they can all be kept in exactly the same way, eat exactly the same food, and once you have conquered keeping them for the first time you can pretty much keep any of them, as long as you observe the fundamentals.Ĭoming from such a large lake, the mbuna are used to clean, clear water, which is free of pollutants and rich in oxygen. Orange blotch (OB) zebras - a calico shubunkin-like, naturally occurring colour. And for many mbuna keepers the progeny can provide a useful supplemental revenue stream.
Keep mature males and females together in the home aquarium and they will breed. The uninitiated wouldn’t know that a female was with eggs or fry at all, and the males didn’t have to turn into giants who would then have to defend the fry against all comers, whether fish, bird or reptile.
#Red zebra cichlid lifespan Patch#
This paid dividends for the early cichlid colonisers of the lake bed as even breeding females were not tied down to any one small patch for a month at a time and instead could be upwardly mobile, go forth and colonise.
All the mbuna, and all the other haplochromines in Lake Malawi are maternal mouthbrooders, meaning that they lay eggs, which are then taken into the female’s mouth where they are incubated, hatched, and then finally spat out as fully formed fry. Maternal mouthbroodersīut the fascination doesn’t stop there, as the mbuna deliver a double whammy of appeal by way of how they breed. Tropheops chilumba female, mouthbrooding - juveniles and females are all yellow in colour. So think freshwater reef fish and you would be about right, as the colourful yellow and blue mbuna we keep bask in the clear blue, sunlit waters and live in and around the rocky outcrops. Things got interesting for the haplochromines however, which went through “adaptive radiation” and today comprise around 1,000 species, which is about as many as live in the whole of the North Atlantic! This was great news for human populations who could then fish the lake for food, scientists who could study evolution - and us fishkeepers, who get to marvel over Malawi’s bountiful beauty in our home aquariums. Image by MP & C Piednoir, Ĭichlids entered Malawi via its tributaries, with two tribes - the tilapiines and the haplochromines - taking up permanent residence there. Lake Malawi is the ninth largest lake in the world. Tales abound of early explorers mistaking it for an ocean, which let’s face it, you would. That’s bigger than Wales…Ī lake of that size comes complete with waves, rocky cliffs and sandy beaches. Its 360 miles long, 50 miles wide and some 11,000 square miles in area. Malawi is the ninth largest lake in the world and the second deepest, at 706m. It filled with river water and fish - and these then changed, evolved and adapted to suit their new, lacustrine environment.Īnd it’s big. Mbuna are endemic to Lake Malawi in Africa’s Great Rift Valley - a 3,700-mile long trench created by the African tectonic plate tearing apart. To keep mbuna at their best we must first look at how and where they live in nature. Image by AquariumPhoto.dk Mbuna in nature
Metriaclima lombardoi is a larger, more aggressive species and is best avoided by the novice mbuna keeper. This all adds to the overall appeal of mbuna. You wouldn’t be able to keep 30 Central American species in one tank - it would be chaos - and even a community tank of fish from many different, very varied genera would struggle to hold that many because so many species need to be kept in groups of their own kind.
An average mbuna community could hold 30 different species - a large tank 50 or more. No other aquarium is capable of holding as many different species of fish per volume as a Malawi cichlid tank. Next is the number of species you can keep together. Yellow and orange are common mbuna colours but importantly, and rarely for any wild-type tropical fish is blue, and this is where the mbuna excel, with literally hundreds of bright blue species, which have tricked many an onlooker into thinking these totally freshwater fish are in fact marine. One qualification any aquarium fish needs to become really popular is colour, and mbuna deliver this in swathes. The mbuna as they are known (pronounced mmm-boon-a or mu-boon-a,) are hardy, easy to keep, easy to breed, and widely available. Above: Cynotilapia afra has the mbuna's classic blue vertical bars.įishkeepers the world over struck gold with the introduction of the small colourful rock dwelling cichlids from East Africa’s Lake Malawi.
0 kommentar(er)
