Have another female holding. It's been five days, now, so it looks like my alpha male has matured enough to make babies at 3 years old, which I'm pretty pleased about. Beta has also gotten more active and assertive recently-- toward all but the alpha, whom he doesn't appear to be ready to take on at all.

Have been so busy lately I haven't had any time to think about setting up a tumbler or to decide how long to let her hold and all of that. Looks like I'm going to have to start giving some thought to how I want to set them up as a breeding colony pretty soon, though!

Got my first confirmed Kapampa spawning action last night (I've seen tubes before but haven't seen any actual spawning). These guys are now getting within just a few weeks of being three years old.

In fact, they're still at it some this morning. Over the past 5 or 6 days, there's been heightened tension among a group of several of the smaller, presumably female Kaps. I interpreted that as the kind of energy that I've seen before as leading up to a spawn. So a couple of days ago I did a water change with cool water to temporarily drop the tank temperature a couple of degrees.

A couple of hours after I'd first come in and saw them doing the spawning dance, there were still no eggs being dropped. So I did an additional water change (25%), again cool water, and within just a few minutes afterward I saw my first egg drop and, yes, the female is holding this morning.

Now it's wait and see. The male is still young, so whether he is mature enough to fertilize the eggs is iffy at this age, plus front keepers often go through a period of unsuccessful spawning before they actually get fry. So, I'm strangely calm about this new development! Not sure if it's because I've done so much breeding of other fish over the years that it's a result of practiced patience or simply knowing that this may be just a first step and that it may take a while before I actually get some fry... but I'm happy with this development in any case! 

Well, here's a little tidbit. Everything was good in my Kapampa tank. As I mentioned in my last entry, not long ago I put a (beautiful) ob peacock in there with them along with doing some minor rock arranging because the Kaps alone were scuffing each other up pretty bad. The peacock is a fry from the male in my avatar and looks very similar to him (even more red/orange to him, just a line I developed a while back)

 All was nice and relatively peaceful, the peacock and fronts not bothering each other and the fronts settled down considerably. Then I decided to put a female ob peacock in there because she was causing trouble in another tank and I knew she'd have to settle down in there with the bigger fronts and the bigger, but fairly peaceful male peacock. Plus, who knows, maybe she'd spawn with him, where she didn't with the male in her former tank.

Now what you might expect from peacocks and what I was watching for was the male peacock to get fired up to spawn and try and dominate the tank, a common peacock behavior, but no problem in this case. He did chase the female, which I kind of wanted to get the mean streak out of her, but left the fronts alone. So all was going according to my master plan...

 Until-- Turns out the alpha Kap did not like the male peacock chasing around, and he wasn't even doing it constantly. But, come home one day and the male peacock is cringing in a corner with a torn eye. A little careful observation, and it's obvious that anytime the alpha Kap gets anywhere in his vicinity, the peacock freaks, which is what tells me the alpha Kap is the one who laid down the law to him. I've had peacocks in this tank for 95% of the time and he'd always been perfectly peaceful to them.

 SO-- the damaged peacock needed a quiet place to go to heal, which meant not much point keeping the female peacock in that tank, which left the fronts to themselves in the tank again. And again I start seeing scuffs on the fronts, which led me to put a ngara in with them (who's been in their tank before) with a little concern over whether the alpha Kap would now tolerate another male peacock.

 But, no problem. Now all is quiet and back to normal again with the ngara minding his business and the Kaps minding theirs. I've heard of people having to remove a rambunctious fish for the good of the fronts because it was stressing them, but in this case it looks like any tankmates for these Kaps better stay in line for the sake of their safety!

 ...And for whatever reason, so far, these Kaps are less likely to damage each other if there's another fish or two in there with them.

Interesting thing happened recently with my Burundi, in terms of feeding and behavior. My normal staple feeding for them has been Omega One color pellets or cichlid pellets, with treats of Omega One shrimp pellets and various species of freeze dried shrimp.

(The color pellets are totally natural and don't have added or artificial 'color enhancers' or result in whacked out colors. They reason they call them 'color pellets' is they have whole salmon, including the skins, as the #1 ingredient.)

Anyway, for whatever whim I had, I'd left off feeding the Omega One pellets to the Burundi and was trying to get them on NLS Thera-A, which the alpha just plain doesn't care for and the other Burundi like only on occasion-- tried for a couple of weeks, actually, including not feeding for a couple of days to get them hungry, etc. etc.

Well, they were gradually coming out less and less, to the point they were all sulking behind some large rocks and not coming out at all, even at feeding time, which normally makes them pretty active. They were getting more and more like this for the past two or three weeks, when a few days ago I began to wonder if they were pouting over the food. So, I decided to go back to their normal favorite food (the alpha, especially, loves the stuff)... and guess what? Within a couple of days they were back to normal, more active, enthusiastic at feeding time etc.

Now this isn't meant to say Omega One is good and NLS is bad or anything like that. I like them both and I've done a LOT of food testing. My Kaps like the Thera-A just fine, and my rotkeil loves the stuff. (Thera-A seems to be good for color also) The point is how much their behavior was affected over not being fed their favorite food for a while!!! I found that pretty interesting.

...Just a note on the Burundi spawn a month ago. Female held a little longer than in the past, but still only 2-1/2 days, indicating the eggs still weren't fertile. The male is still too young, no doubt, being less than 3 years old.

Since I'm keeping a limit on how many tanks I want to take care of right now, I sometimes eye the Burundi tank with thoughts of doing something else with it-- I have the Kaps, which are more what I wanted in the first place, and they aren't that far behind in age, size, etc, considering the fronts are a several year project in the first place. Then again, the Burundi alpha has gotten to be a cool fish...