Here are the four beauties sharing a 110g tank.
10" Oscar and the
7" Jack Dempsey have been living peacefully together for about three years. The
4" Red Tiger Cichlid (on the bottom) joined the family 3 months ago. The latest addition is the small
(3") Jaguar cichlid, who has been bothering our
5" Albino Oscar in another tank. The
Red Tiger (Motaguense) and the
Jaguar (Managuense) will not be in this tank for long, maybe 2-3 months the maximum. The reason is that these two fish get really aggressive as they mature and probably would kill their more senior tank mates or each other. They both belong to the Parachromis family which are known to be really aggressive. They will get their own tanks as they get bigger, and will have to get used to living solitary lives :)
More about the tank. We use two
Emperor 400's for filtration, lots of air bubbles and a
Aquaclear 802 powerhead for surface agitation and water movement in the tank. We do frequent water changes and use
Python Vacuum gravel cleaner to clean the bottom of the tank, as these fish are really messy eaters :) We usually feed them with Hikary gold pellets, but they occasionally get treated with earthworms, shrimps, and feeder fish that we raise in a separate tank. They are pretty active, but they don't usually fight. As its size suggests,
Oscar rules the tank. Occasionally it chases the
JD, but
JD escapes all the time and no aggression occurs. We used to have a
Convict in the tank before we introduced the little
Jaguar, it was about the same size as the
Red Tiger and they kept fighting for territory. They rarely liplocked though, they usually showed off to each other and one gave way until the next confrontation. We decided to take out the Convict and put him in our
Red Devil's tank. He is doing fine there, for some reason our
Red Devil has a tolerance towards convicts (more on this later)
At different points in time, we tried introducing giant danios into our 110g for more action. These little fellows swim really fast, and they are usually recommended as "dither fish" that keep the attention of aggressive cichlids that otherwise would fight each other. They are really difficult to catch, when we got them from the LFS, there was this unlucky girl that tried to catch them. It happened to be her first day in the job, and because of us, she looked like she hated it already (we got 6 danios and she spent about 15 mins to catch them!) Anyway, back to our tank. In our case, we just wanted to get our fat
Oscar to move more, and we put 6 giant danios in the tank. Well, they could last only for a week, as the
Oscar hunted them one by one. It turns out our chubby
Oscar was not slow after all :)
Labels: jack dempsey, jaguar, pleco, red tiger, tank 1, tiger oscar
