Our Fishies: Red Devil's Mansion

This is our 4-foot 55g tank that houses our 8" Red Devil cichlid. First of all, this is one mean cichlid that does not like any other tankmate (except convicts, more on this :)). He is our most personable fish (maybe with our smaller albino oscar) that behaves like a dog! whenever he sees you, he starts dancing, comes to the surface of the water, and does some cool tricks. That being said, he does not like to see human hands in the water, whenever he sees one, he swims towards it to take a bite! Imagine how difficult this makes doing water changes, or gravel cleaning.

He is one big redecorator. No matter how you decorate your tank, one day later you will see him redecorate the whole thing. He moves the gravel to different parts of the tank to make big hills, reaches the bare bottom of the tank to take a peek at the compartment below the tank to see if we left any food for him down there, and he shreds our precious fake plants to pieces (real plants, you can't even imagine keeping them in a Red Devil tank)

Can you see his teeth?

He is a messy eater as well. Some might say a 55 gallon tank is too small for an adult size Red Devil. Ours has not reached his adult size yet, and looks like he is really enjoying his tank. In the future we might look for a slightly bigger tank for him. We have a powerful filtering system for this tank as well. We put two HOB filters that clean about 700 gallons of water per hour. That means all the water in the tank is filtered and cleaned about 13 times every hour. We frequently test the water parameters, and they seem optimal all the time.

Feeding Red Devil

Right now he has two tank mates: two convicts that we put into his tank and thought would be eaten immediately. Well, that did not happen. He seems to have a tolerance towards them. He does not mind seeing them swimming around, cleaning his mess after each feeding. The convicts are small, probably he does not see them as a threat. And they have ample hiding places as well.