FishProfiles.com Message Forums

Hi i just bought 7 convicts and they are doin fine. They havent fought or become territorial. They are in a 35" tank and i was just wonderin which fish i could have in there with em.

Cheers

None. They havent settled in fine, they are just immature, when they grow in a couple of months the killing will start. You bought 3 times too many for the size of the tank as it is, you cant add more fish without there being many deaths. There will be deaths anyway, unless you keep only two.

Um. Yeah. LHG is right.

I don't know much about cichlids, but I do know that there's a reason the LFS only has 2 convicts per tank...not only can you not put any other fish in there, and if you don't separate what's in there now, you're going to have serious Fish Wars.

Listen! Do you smell that?

None.

If you want to keep a pair-one pair-in your tank that would be fine. Have plans or arrangements made for the inevitable fry.

You've asked about tankmates for these fish a number of times. The answer is still the same: no other fish in your tank with the convicts.

In the future it would be a good idea to research stock before making an actual purchase.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is water at the bottom of the ocean

Hi,

We had six convicts in a tank at my friends place, which were in fact three pairs. Just a couple of days after they had been added, the wars began. All three of them decided to breed at the same time. The behavior was very interesting yet alarming, and pieces of their fins began to disappear. We got two more 20g tanks urgently and separated the pairs. Now we have three batches of fry Im sure if we had not separated the three pairs, there would have been only one surviving pair.

But, we lost four blue loaches, which definitely are not the timidest of the loaches before the movement. Once convicts decide to breed, they will even attack your hands when you try to clean/rearrange the tank! They are so bold. Love the personality of these little fishes

Moral of the story: Not more than one pair of convicts in a tank....and no tank mates. And as Theresa said, never buy a fish before doing some (actually, a lot of) research on it.

-Mughal