[CMGohio]

55 Gal 48" long. HOB75 and Fx4 filter.

looking at Peacocks, small, so I can watch grow and see what I get. How many types, and how many of each type...also what else does the tank need?

Will also add 1 pleco, they seem to be pretty compatible.

 

[DJRansome]

One bristlenose pleco has a 75% success rate with Malawi IME.

I would do a single species. That way you can sell the extra females as pure and go from there whether you do mixed gender or all male.

Adult peacocks females are effectively impossible to ID the individual species, so once they are mixed you would have to raise them in your home.

What is your long term goal for stocking the tank?

Avoid hybrid peacocks and jacobfreibergi which can be too large/aggressive to be ideal in a 55G.

 

[CMGohio]

so your saying if you had 2 males, different species, and 6 females, you wouldn't really be able to tell if they are one or the other? they will cross breed?
long term- visually appealing. not looking to become a breeder, or anything else. just have some cool fish and a nice tank to look at.

 

[DJRansome]

If the 2 different species were peacocks, you would not be able to tell the females apart.

For max color and breeding, consider mbuna like yellow labs or Labidochromis caeruleus. They have a lot of species with colorful females.

Think in terms of 3 species with 1m:4f of each.

 

[CMGohio]

if you had peacock A with 3 A females, and peacock B with 3 B females, A and B would cross breed, leaving you with a bunch of mixed babies, and you would only know if they were pure after raising them, and looking at the male coloration...which could take a long time? am I on the right track there?

 

[ken31cay]

if you had peacock A with 3 A females, and peacock B with 3 B females, A and B would cross breed, leaving you with a bunch of mixed babies, and you would only know if they were pure after raising them, and looking at the male coloration...which could take a long time? am I on the right track there?

I think that's pretty much it. But also all the females, regardless of age, look the same which is dull & bland with little or no color to speak of.

 

[CMGohio]

I like the fins on the peacocks, so what I'm taking from this is buy one type only, grow them up, see which are males and females. if they do breed down the road, you will have a pure line of fish, that's if the place you bought them from has pure line adults. Thanks, I didn't think of it that way.

 

[DJRansome]

Also if you did mix them and later wanted to sell them or give them away, you couldn't. You would want to provide tank space for the unwanted females for their 8 year life span.

You would never know for sure if the babies spawned in a mixed tank were pure because hybrids can look exactly like their parents. So you would keep them.

Many of us do not have tank space to devote to fish that could be rehomed if you knew what species they were, so we avoid cross breeding and mixing undistinguishable females like the plague.

However, you could have peacock 1m:4f in the same tank with hap 1m:4f and be perfectly fine as long as the females don't look alike...and as long as the hap is not fryeri. Some haps have even nicer fins than peacocks.

 

[Trademark27]

I've had a tank going for over 2 months now with small mbuna and a bristlenose, the bristlenose has been doing fine. He definitely got beat up at the start because he was small but he looks good now. My biggest concern with him has been feeding, my fish are the definition of gluttony. I've tried sneaking in algae wafers at various times of the night and it always ends up pulled to someone's cave. I've had algae grow and let him eat that, the cichlids like it too. My suggestion would be to get a bristlenose that's bigger than the other fish you buy.