G'day Darrell Ullisch,
Awesome dorsigera.
I spent a couple of years looking for dorsigera with no success here. I don't know if your aware, but Australia has some pretty restrictive import laws when it comes to the ornamental fish trade. Basically no one would import them becuase there was no demand for them, even though they are on our Allowable Import List
Then out of the blue a small shipment came in, and was split between 3 LFS here. Out of about 30 fish, I was only able to identify 2 females, and they were at different LFS. The fish were all young adults, and the two females paired up in the LFS tanks. My regular LFS held it's pair for me untill I could set up a new tank, the other LFS moved it's pair to it's planted SA display tank. I bought the first pair from my regular LFS, and then headed over to the other LFS, but unfortunately some one had bought it's pair the day before.
I also have a pair of curviceps. Almost all our curviceps come from Asian farms and are pretty washed out. I bought my pair from the LFS owned by the president of our Cichlid Club. They were bred locally, and are supposed to have come from wild caught stock.
My curvieps turn Blue during breeding. Here are a couple of photos. My photographic skills are pretty bad, and it's a rarity if I manage to get an in-focus shot.
My pair. Photo taken when I was cleaning the tank.
Male guarding eggs
Female patrolling the area
The eggs hatched the next day and the pair moved the wigglers into a flower pot.
My female goes into Super Blue stay away mode.
Well, this won't help figure out where your fish came from, but I thought it might add some incentive for someone to go looking. In 1972, my friend Randy Barfell spawned a fish that we were told was "curviceps" by the experts of the day. I was in the Navy at the time, and by the time I got out in '75, there were no more of these around. I've been looking for this population of
dorsigera ever since, as it is the only one that is cherry red, rather than the dark wine red/purple color of the strains I've seen lately. I bred a wine red population in '79, without the black of pk333's strain. By 1983 I was aware of the differences between
curviceps and
dorsigera, and bred the real
curviceps, which turned almost completely black during breeding.
This picture, taken by Randy Barfell, is the strain of
dorsigera from 1972; you can see why I wanted it back so badly.
dorsigera 72.JPG
I've also bred "Buckelkopf", had
flavilabris (which were sold to me as
thayeri) lay eggs once, and seen the real
thayeri spawning in a friend's tank in Milwaukee. The one I haven't seen, and would love to get, is the "Orangeflossen",
fulvipinnis.[/quote]
