and wanted to spend some time with him and Amir. This same plant i had once got from bappaditya mukhopadhy form gurgaon, but i keep losing it! Again i was a leeeeeeeetle late, and rajiv was already in a steam Naturally, i was very sorry (again as usual hehe). Then i got lost in the buzy market could not find the shop! anyway, after some timely directions from amir on the phone, i reached my long-suffering friends. Like all huge fishy fans, we can never resist staring at each and every tank like little excited boys. this time i found some Ramirezi (Mikrogeophagus ramirezi), perhaps the most beautiful well-behaved interesting dwarf cichlids, an old time classic in the hobby. I wanted a breeding pair so i bought 6 hoping i would get at least one breeding pair from them. As i knew, females have blue spots inside the dark spot on the sides while males have pure black spots, so i chose three that had them and three that did not. total 6. but dear Amir, that precocious fellow, felt totally convinced that i had got 5 males and one female and, naturally, i would expose the single lady to grave danger henceforth. Five big healthy men and one single and very pretty woman??? God help her.....
Listening to him, i lost all faith in my sexing methods L Amir does that to you
Even though the boy had put the fish in the half-oxygen half-water bag, all ready for taking home, i was geting some serious guilt pangs As I slept or was in office, would my tank be the scene of some terrible terrible crimes? .. All the way back, I got regrets. In 24 hours, I started seeing red bellies (female coloration in ramirezi) in exactly 3 fish. In 4 days, the largest male had pushed every fish back except the chosen one, and I could see eggs neatly stuck to the tank glass, in the quietest corner. I wasn’t really interested in babies ,but I was delighted because it showed there was going to be no harassment of single women in my tank! Ha ha. They were all happily paired, another pair laid eggs on a piece of wood. By a fortnight, I had the third pair also choose a corner and do the deed. I have one moth catfish, so when the eggs disappeared in 2-3 days, I knew someone was having a very rich protein diet. The tank is a 2 footer, and has 10 male guppies from the India gate shop, one moth catfish (hara pusilla), and one Ancistrus longfin pleco (2 inches only). So no real chance of a dwarf cichlid saving their fry, but how to tell them that??
Dwarf cichlids are great because they combine the colur and behaviour of cichlids with the docile nature of cyprinids and tetras. Their parental care is a sight for sore eyes. I hope I can enjoy them till Spring, when I will hopefully be able to exchange 2-3 unrelated ramirezi and then breed them.
Till then, here are a few pics of the classic dwarf species. I feed them microfex worms, tetrabits, egg yolk dried bits, grindal worms, and mosquito larvae. they are the only fish that like Hikari goldfish flakes (the guppies ignore them
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