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Here are the pics of the unkonwn one:
http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y179/Xlinkinparkx/?action=view&current=IMGP4451.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y179/Xlinkinparkx/IMGP4449.jpg

http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y179/Xlinkinparkx/?action=view&current=IMGP4446.jpg

http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y179/Xlinkinparkx/?action=view&current=IMGP4445.jpg

They have blue eyes, well if u can ID them that would really help becuase I would love to do some reasearch on this fish, sorry about the sucky pictures there very hard to get a decent picture of thank you

10gallon: 8neons 5gallon: 1betta
1oto
2platys

Hard to tell from the pictures, I'm guessing it's either Archocentrus spilurus or sajica.

Both sajica and spilurus are in Cryptoheros, at least according to the Cichlid Room.

Here's their pages on those two species:

Cryptoheros sajica

Cryptoheros spilurus

The fact that this Cichlid is a dark brown colour led me to think "ah ... coryphoenoides perhaps?" Trouble being of course that it's listed as Cichlasoma copryphoenoides in the venerable Innes book, whose Cichlid taxonomy is massively out of date. So, trawl through the South American genera ... and it's now Hypselecara copryphoenoides. Used to be known as the Chocolate Cichlid or Dolphin Cichlid.

Check your fish against this image and other images of the same species (it's pretty variable in appearance by the way) and see if your fish matches this. Note the assorted synonyms - it was this fish that was collected in the late 1970s and mislabelled Chuco axelrodi, in the belief that it was a new species because the individuals collected were black (and at the time, an all black Cichlid was considered to be something seriously new). Indeed, Axelrod offered a $10,000 reward for the first person to bring back live specimens of the "Black Cichlid", but it was discovered that the "black" specimens weren't black when alive! They turned black upon death (they were collected using MS-222) and in this resemble some other fishes that undergo dramatic colour changes between life and death (the Characin Hemigrammus coeruleus is another - in life it is blue, but turns iridescent red prior to death).

Incidentally, you would KNOW if you had Cryptoheros sajica, because it has very conspicuous intensely green eyes - hence the common name of Jade Eye Cichlid.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

the fish in the first 2 pics is a male sajica and the fish in the last 2 pics is a female sajica. also, C. sajica do actually have blue eyes, just like C. spilurus, C. nanoluteus and probably a couple of others also.

and in case you're going to ask, male sajica have reddish/purple finnage and females have yellow dorsal with black trimmed tip.

Blue?

Last one I photographed definitely had green eyes ... ???

Correction, it was a spilurus. Just checked the photos. I photographed one with fry in a dealer's.



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002