New Trick - Keeping Many Aggressive Convict Cichlids Together

aggressive cichlids cannot be kept together as adults as they will literally kill eahother. you can keep them together as babies, but as they begin to grow, you will notice their agresion toward eachother. upon reaching aulthood, they will not even stand the presence of one another. the very sight of another imilar sized adult cichlid will make their blood boil. cishlids are territirial fish and need a lot of pace from eachother. if you keep many adults together, they will establish a pecking order. they will target one at a time and kill eachother. its more like a last man standing game.

but today im going to share with you an amazing trick that has worked for me. i have got dozens of adult convict cichlids together in one tub. the tub isn't even that big. the magic is worked by a thick vegetative mass of hydrilla verticillata, an invasive aquatic plant species. ydrilla provides multiple benifits to the convict cichlids like refuge from eachother, shade from the sun, a safe feeling which i important for fish health and development, water conditioning, removal o ammonia and nitrates etc. the filh will thrive even without waterchanges for a month.

a huge dense mass of this plant prevents these fish from targeting eachother and causing stres tyo eachother. even though in cloe proximity to one another, they are unable to affeciently attack eachother. after uing this trick, i have noticed a drastic improvement in hunger health and growth. they tart to grow to wild sizes like you never see in aquariums. they start to feel more like they are in the wild.

now that i have spoken about this idea and you have got the whole concept of thi, i will explain how to succesfully set this up without failure.

1. Make sure you have a large volume of plants in the aquarium before you introduce the fish. if you have just a tiny amount of hydrilla, you cannot easly get t to establish in a tank full of many fish as it would not be able to handle the bio load and the fish will also damage the plant thu preventing it from growing. you will have to grow the plat separately till it increases to a significant amount with a few fish first. remember that the plant should be the dominating thing in the tank. the plant should roughly cover 80% of the aquarium. the fish will learn to move effeciently amoung the dense forest.
2. Light - Sunlight is one of the best light for all plants, but if your house does not get sunlight, you can use white ddaylight tubelight or cfl. hydrilla is not too fusy about light and will do quite well under a white cfl or tube. nowdays you get submerable lamps which is actually a t4 tube encased in a waterproof glass capsule. you can sim ply throw in a submersable and leave it afloat among some hydrilla and watch the plant utilize as much light as possible from it and growing.
3. Maintainance - Once or twice in a month some water changes will be good. make sure you remove the exces plant mass. you need to leave some place for the fish. you might also need to sometimes wash the plants as a lot of dirt may attach to the leaves if you use airstones. you can simpley remove the plants and spray some water on them and put them bak. there are many ways you can do this.
4. OXYGEN - A very important thing is oxygen. once hydrilla establishes a significant mass in the aquarium, it will drastically deplete oxygen levels at night. during the night the plant utilizes oxygen duing respiration. i would recommend a good bubble wand as long as posible although even a simple air stone will suffice. make sure the oxygen runs all time espeially at night as if it in't running at night, this can be detrimental to the fish.

The Convict Cichlid (Kindle Edition Ebook)