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I picked up a gorgeous little yellow cichlid today, that was labelled as a red jewel. It is yellow and absolutely covered in a mottled iridescence pattern, blue/green. The fins are clear but iridescent and edged in orange/black, and there is a faint black spot the size of the eyeball, paralell to the eye, on the gill plate. The torso does not narrow towards the tail like most of the SA cichlids.
All of the 20 or so in the tank showed no signs of sexual dimorphism, and all were minorly territorial. Some larger ones had bright red around the gills.
I dont think this is the typical jewel cichlid, unless it's some sort of colour morph, because the body is almost entirely iridescent, and it's not all arranged in little spotted row, sort of all over the place.


Second problem is a little guy I found and was about to buy, but then I thought that he may be a GT. He had the body shape of a ram, fairly dark in colouring, with a couple black spots midline of the torso. The fins were edged in a bit of yellow, and around the chin/gills was some iridescence like GTs. He was only abotu 1 1/2 inches long but very spunky and territorial. He looks similar to this fish: http://www.aquazoo.co.uk/page.cfm/Type=Fish/ID=252

But how do I tell the difference between an aureum and a juvie gt? They seemed very similar to me.. Does anybody have any pics of a juvenile terror?


Thanks so much in helping identify these two! and sorry I can't get a pic !

here are some pics of Thorichthys aureum. This fish should be fairly easy to distinguish from a green terror or blue acara, both of which look very similar as juveniles. The aureum will look more like a firemouth than a green terror.

here is a pic of a blue acara. juvenile green terrors will look pretty close to this, but green terrors are a bit more elongated whereas this blue acara looks a bit more roundish than gt's.

Don't know how much that helps.

Jason

for some reason the "edit" feature seems to be messing up the link...

I wanted to add that I can say with about 95% certainty that the fish you saw was not a T. aureum. These fish as juveniles will be more of a light grey color and their dorsal fin is edged in red, not yellow. Blue acaras and green terrors will have fins edged in white, yellow or orange and these fish do have a pretty dark overall coloration. There's a very good chance that you saw one of these 2 fish.

Jason

Alright it didn't look like either of those two.. but it did have the same body shape as the aureum. The iridesence was confined just to his head and his face looked alot like a gt.
Likely he was a terror, which would explain his territorial personality. Thank you very much!!!

And I have come to the conclusion that I have a particularily lovely female jewel cichlid. Although she seems too friendly..

Thanks again Jason!