At the moment I have a very aggressive 75g Mbuna tank. I have two holding females. First holding female is a Metriaclima greshakei I am not sure if the male is my albino or another regular gene. I am pretty sure it's the albino. There are four males and about eight females. The other is one of my Pseudotropheus crabro is holding. There are three females and one male. This has my male (Tank Boss) Metriaclima lombardoi mad. I had to move his partner because he beat her up the last time she wasn't in the mood to spawn. I plan to move her back next week. The lombardoi is trying to find any female he can and chasing everyone off in his quest to do so.

I did a water change yesterday and this is when I found all this going on. I noticed a few fry thumbnail clipping size moving around on the bare glass of the bottom. I looks like greshakei fry from the last spawn that somehow made it (probably not for too much longer). Needless to say I got my hand nudged around by the two most dominant males yesterday. The lombardoi was trying to take blood from me. You want to see an aggressive Mbuna tank get em some good clean water and let em all spawn at once!

Part Two...

I decided to move the female Kenyi back last night. I put her in and went and put my nets over the sink. You wont believe what happened next! I am watching the tank looking to see if the others I mentioned in part one were still holding. They were holding so the eggs are likely fertile. Then I look to see if the female is doing ok, to my suprise she had a mouth full of eggs! I dont know if she stole them or picked them up from another fish dropping them or what. So I netted her and moved her back to the 20g. We will see what happens. This happened in less than 10 minutes....truely amazing!

Woah talk about baby snatching!

Mike D wrote:

Woah talk about baby snatching!

Keep us updated, very interesting so far.

Ok...OK the eggs were unfertile...She spit them out after a few days. I left her in there for another week. I tried to move her back Sunday night. The male immediately started trying to spawn with her. She was having nothing to do with it. A long story short he beat her up again and I had to move her back to the 20g. The others all have fry and are still mouthboarding I hope to get a few fry from them.

Thank you....