Demasoni were the first cichlid I ever kept. I got them to spawn twice while killing them all with malawi bloat. Too eager to breed, I was pumping them with too much protein.
Fast foward 5 years later, I have many species under my belt including many different types of tropheus, other mbuna etc. Now that I've been lucky enough to breed anything that touches my water. I want to go back and redo my first mistake!
Most of what I read on fish online differs from personal experience. Most often information is lead by fear.
My question to everyone is, have they kept a colony of Demasoni in a tank with only substrate? I know I do it easily with everything else I've wanted to breed. I have 1000+ gallons of water in my fish room, and while display tanks are nice, I'd like to breed the Demasoni. Should my plan not work. I simply load it up with rocks etc.
The plan:
25 Demasoni Juvis
55 gallon sand substrate tank
Overhead wet dry filter.
New Life spectrum Food
Have a custom larger breeder box inside the tank. As each new male show himself, put him into the box. When another one shows itself, rehome the male in the box, move the one that just showed up into the box, repeat until I'm left with 1-2 males, and 12+ females.
Does this sound crazy? I know someone else out there had to have done it. I know my wholesaler keeps hundreds of dems at 2 inch in stock tanks etc. While this is not a breeding setup, aggression can be fought off with numbers obviously.
In my experience, if you don't give fish territory to fight over, they can mellow out, and just use the substrate to breed instead of a flat rock.
Being that this was my first big failure, I'm talking my plan out to get any tips from guys who've bred dems for the past 10 years
Fast foward 5 years later, I have many species under my belt including many different types of tropheus, other mbuna etc. Now that I've been lucky enough to breed anything that touches my water. I want to go back and redo my first mistake!
Most of what I read on fish online differs from personal experience. Most often information is lead by fear.
My question to everyone is, have they kept a colony of Demasoni in a tank with only substrate? I know I do it easily with everything else I've wanted to breed. I have 1000+ gallons of water in my fish room, and while display tanks are nice, I'd like to breed the Demasoni. Should my plan not work. I simply load it up with rocks etc.
The plan:
25 Demasoni Juvis
55 gallon sand substrate tank
Overhead wet dry filter.
New Life spectrum Food
Have a custom larger breeder box inside the tank. As each new male show himself, put him into the box. When another one shows itself, rehome the male in the box, move the one that just showed up into the box, repeat until I'm left with 1-2 males, and 12+ females.
Does this sound crazy? I know someone else out there had to have done it. I know my wholesaler keeps hundreds of dems at 2 inch in stock tanks etc. While this is not a breeding setup, aggression can be fought off with numbers obviously.
In my experience, if you don't give fish territory to fight over, they can mellow out, and just use the substrate to breed instead of a flat rock.
Being that this was my first big failure, I'm talking my plan out to get any tips from guys who've bred dems for the past 10 years