exCichlasoma ornatum

[Bas Pels]

They are brautiful............

[fevelasco]

DRE, your fish are magnificent specimens. Please share a bit more about how you are raising them. Thanks.

[DRE]

I just love them to death

They show a lot of character and they feed very differently from their tank mates, Aequidens sp. Janero Herrera and Heros sp. red shoulder.
My Aequidens stay at the surface and just slurp in whatever falls there. The Heros moves slowly upwards and suck a little pice at a time. The ornatum hold 10-15 cm under surface and glance up to the food and very very quickly pushes up to snap the food with a huge splash. The kids love it and yeah me to

I have some thoughts on the Aequidens since the male is very dominant and disturbs the spawning for the ornatums by placing himself in the middle of the pair in their prepared area making it impossible for them to get in the right mood I feel. Not sure what to do with that actually.

I keep 4 or these and a pair each of the other ones in a 936 liter tank with BTN modules. I have pretty high flow of water. One external filer 1900 l/h + 2 in the modules of about 1250 l/h. Not really suitable for apistogrammas bu these fishes seem to enjoy the stay.

I exchange water every week with about 200 liter each time and every fourth 50% of the tank. I have a pH of about 6,5 once settled. It starts at 7 and drops due to lots of wood in the tank I guess. Nothing actively is done to change pH or other parameters.

I have som crinum plants which grows well.

Yeah I guess that's about it.

[gnuisance]

Very nice looking ornatums. Would you mind explaining how you determine the sex of the individual fish? Is there a black blotch visible on the dorsal fin?

[fevelasco]

My trio of juveniles have grown about 2 cm (0.75") since I acquired them. Still displaying sub-adult coloration.

Juvenile exCichlasoma cf. gephyrum-ornatum 091512.png (169.39 KiB) Viewed 304 times

Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh6Qklzn8CA&hd=1

Also, I've met a hobbyist in Sweden online who has spawned this fish in a heavily planted aquarium. The fry did not reach the free-swimming stage, but the pair appear to be preparing to spawn again.

YouTube video of brooding female: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjdmqoohKpQ&hd=1

Have any of you had any success with captive spawning in the aquarium?

[DRE]

Yep it seems to be dominance.

However I have 4 and they are now all aroung 20cm and no one has this barring. The markings I notice are that the largest one has very smooth cheeks. And the 3 smaller ones have very marked spots on the cheeks that now start to merge into longer and longer wiggling lines (like male Heros), still very short line sthough.

Some photos of my cf. ornatum (with smooth cheeks), they are even smoother now this was a couple of months ago:



The ones with more markings, very similar in size, slightly smaller (I'm guessing these are males):

Now I also have it as clear as it can be. These are exCichlasoma gephyrum! I had 4 (3+1) and I have brought 1 of them to Natural history Museum in stockholm to Sven Kullander and we spend some time today looking at the spcies I brought and lots of bottled gephyrum as well as ornatum. He is quite certain it is gephyrum. It seems on all the ones we looked at the gephyrum had much more spots in the cheek than any of the ornatums and he had some really big ones. Females however have less spots. Also gephyrum have markings behind the last place were the dorsal fin is attached to the back of the fish whilst ornatum does not have any markings that far back.
The stripes on the side are either fully stripes or broken stripes on both species.

But Sven also added that; Well you never know they are quite similar and very hard to really split without a proper study.

Nice to know to a high degree of certainty at least.