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In a previous post, I mentioned I purchased my first pair of Convicts. I couldn`t tell if the "male" was a male. Well, as it turns out, he is a she,LOL. Which is fine. Next week, I am planning on going to the fish store to get me a male Convict - Pay day is next Friday.

The question is, the 2 females I have now: One is deep, dark, colored - Beautiful - Dark stripes, bright red scales on her belly & bright yellow scales too. The other one gets pestered by this female. She chases the other all over the tank. I know it is for territory purposes & etc. The "non aggressive" female - her color - is always light. She has Red Scales on her belly & stripes (the stripes are grey, not black) but her markings are not as dark as the other.

Should I completely remove the one female & place her in a differant tank? I tried that already tho & she didn`t respond well to it at all, so I put her back. She eats healthy daily & is growing as fast as the other one. -OR- Should everything "be ok" once I do get a male Convict in there? Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead of time to all those that reply. Happy Labor Day Weekend (Coming up).

how big is this tank?

37 gal Eclipse System, strong filtration.

I have a 10 gallon tank with three "blue" convicts in it. I thought I had two females, but I have two males...problem, I know, but I learned that if you have two females and a male, they will try and level out the aggressive behavior of the two females. Just...make sure they're two females...hehe :88)

I would get the male, see which female he pairs up with and then trade in the extra female. once a pair forms and they start breeding, the odd female could be hurt and/or killed. There have also been odd instances of males spawning with 2 females at once but that would produce more convict fry than you'd know what to do with.

As for the coloring, that's very typical of American Cichlids. The dominant fish's color will be much darker and brighter while the submissive fish's color will be lighter and dull. I have several female convicts in my 125 gallon tank and only the largest, dominant female's colors are nice and bright. In fact, here's a pic of her.



Jason[/font]

that's an awesome convict!

Jason brought up a good point about the fry. Even with one pair, if successful, you will have more little ones than you know what to do with. I checked into breeding convicts and one of the issues I ran into is that nearly all lfs's are maxed out with them. So I couldn't tarde them for credit or whatever. Barring a suggestion from someone else, you may want to check into this yourself. Or you might know what you are going to do already. HTH

-greg

[Edit] I agree that is an awesome looking Con!

[span class="edited"][Edited by Desdinova 2004-09-04 23:47][/span]