Hello Robby!
06 Jan 98 15:17, Robby Dittmann wrote to All:
 RD> I need some helping breeding my convicts.
Have found that keeping them relatively moist and feeding them causes them to 
breed.  :c)
 RD> I have a pair that seems to be mating.
Are you sure that you have a male-female pair.  Have seen a female-female 
pairing where eggs were produced regularly with similar results.
The female will be smaller (usually), with a faintly orange belly when ready 
to lay.  The male will be larger (usually), and have pointier fins than the 
female.  He will also have a lump on his forehead?--hard to describe without 
pictures.
Make sure they have a lot of veggies in their diet--I used to use Tetra 
Condition Food and Doro=Green regularly with them, along with plankton and 
regular flake.
For the fry, feed with Tetra Egglayer food for fry, 'til they'll eat finely 
ground flake and plankton.
 RD> She is laying a batch of eggs on a flat rock
 RD> every few weeks.  Each time the eggs get layed the pair stand
 RD> guard for a few days, then the eggs just seem to disappear.
Have had good results with large ceramic skulls used as breeding caves. 
Convicts definitely prefer a cave to a flat rock.
 RD> The tank is 33 gallons.  It contains 2 other convicts (one male, one
 RD> unknown), a Dempsey, and a large plecostamus.
Might be a little much fish load for a 33--though I've had 2 breeding pairs 
of convicts in one.  They didn't seem too happy, though.
Watch your filtration also--use bubble-airlifts if you have an undergravel 
filter.  The fry are small enough to be sucked through the substrate, and 
they aren't going to like getting pulled apart by a powerhead.  The 
stocking-over-the-intake trick mostly works for power filters, though 
sometimes they get stuck to it--set the flow pretty low.
The convicts will also like to dig holes in the substrate, and herd their fry 
into it, which in an undergravel setup is a bad thing.
 RD> My first thought
 RD> was that the pleco was doing it, but he seems to be very
 RD> frightened by the convicts, and I've even taken to over-feeding
 RD> him when there are eggs present, just in case.
He was right to be afraid.  Keeping a convict breeding tank clean is a 
problem--I couldn't keep anything else in the tank with one particular pair. 
Saw the male bite the eyes out of a pleco, grab him by the eyesockets, and 
swim around with him. Kinda funny, though grim--the pleco was probably 3 
times the size of the convict. Let's just say they're rather protective of 
their fry.
 RD> Any advice?
Oops, forgot to mention this and it's fairly important.  Before you start
breeding them, you need to find a bunch of people that you can give baby 
convicts to. If you do everything right, you will get _quite a few_ fry from 
each breeding, quickly overrunning the capacity of all your local fish 
stores, necessitating the list of friends and acquaintances who will accept 
excess fish.
You need to get rid of them when they get about the size of a nickel,or at 
the outside, the size of a quarter.
Then again, convicts kept me in fish supplies for about a year, 'til they 
overran my tanks, the local fishstores, and all my friend's tanks (and 
onds).
:c)
Later,
Brian.
--- GoldED 2.42.G0214
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