BREEDING MBUNA CICHLIDS | DEMONSONI | MAINGANO AND YELLOW LAB

MBUNA CICHLIDS | AFRICAN CICHLIDS
One qualification any aquarium fish needs to become really popular is colour, and mbuna deliver this in swathes. Yellow and orange are common mbuna colours but importantly, and rarely for any wild-type tropical fish is blue, and this is where the mbuna excel, with literally hundreds of bright blue species, which have tricked many an onlooker into thinking these totally freshwater fish are in fact marine.
Next is the number of species you can keep together. No other aquarium is capable of holding as many different species of fish per volume as a Malawi cichlid tank. An average mbuna community could hold 30 different species - a large tank 50 or more. You wouldn’t be able to keep 30 Central American species in one tank - it would be chaos - and even a community tank of fish from many different, very varied genera would struggle to hold that many because so many species need to be kept in groups of their own kind. This all adds to the overall appeal of mbuna.
To keep mbuna at their best we must first look at how and where they live in nature. Mbuna are endemic to Lake Malawi in Africa’s Great Rift Valley - a 3,700-mile long trench created by the African tectonic plate tearing apart. Malawi is a gigantic crevice. It filled with river water and fish - and these then changed, evolved and adapted to suit their new, lacustrine environment.
And it’s big. Malawi is the ninth largest lake in the world and the second deepest, at 706m. Its 360 miles long, 50 miles wide and some 11,000 square miles in area. That’s bigger than Wales…
A lake of that size comes complete with waves, rocky cliffs and sandy beaches. Tales abound of early explorers mistaking it for an ocean, which let’s face it, you would.
Cichlids entered Malawi via its tributaries, with two tribes - the tilapiines and the haplochromines - taking up permanent residence there. Things got interesting for the haplochromines however, which went through “adaptive radiation” and today comprise around 1,000 species, which is about as many as live in the whole of the North Atlantic! This was great news for human populations who could then fish the lake for food, scientists who could study evolution - and us fishkeepers, who get to marvel over Malawi’s bountiful beauty in our home aquariums.
So think freshwater reef fish and you would be about right, as the colourful yellow and blue mbuna we keep bask in the clear blue, sunlit waters and live in and around the rocky outcrops. Cichlid paradise!
But the fascination doesn’t stop there, as the mbuna deliver a double whammy of appeal by way of how they breed. All the mbuna, and all the other haplochromines in Lake Malawi are maternal mouthbrooders, meaning that they lay eggs, which are then taken into the female’s mouth where they are incubated, hatched, and then finally spat out as fully formed fry.
This paid dividends for the early cichlid colonisers of the lake bed as even breeding females were not tied down to any one small patch for a month at a time and instead could be upwardly mobile, go forth and colonise. The uninitiated wouldn’t know that a female was with eggs or fry at all, and the males didn’t have to turn into giants who would then have to defend the fry against all comers, whether fish, bird or reptile.
Keep mature males and females together in the home aquarium and they will breed. And for many mbuna keepers the progeny can provide a useful supplemental revenue stream.
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[@jackanddan]

Awesome underwater shots of these beauties Raleigh

[@FKJ_WORLD]

Glad you enjoyed it, irie boss

[@marievicky1274]

Beautiful and colorful fish swimming in the fish tank.

[@FKJ_WORLD]

Respect

[@JohnAmes]

Great video my friend

[@FKJ_WORLD]

Respect boss

[@newlevelthomas9934]

👍👍👍

[@FKJ_WORLD]

Respect boss

[@techrevja]

Where are you located and are they for sale?

[@FKJ_WORLD]

Greetings boss, currently i dont have stock to sell. They are currently in breeding mode. Thanks for stopping by, blessings

[@giofromjamaica]

Ok understood

[@NoSaltBP.org.]

Always great to visit!

[@FKJ_WORLD]

Thanks sis