BREEDING
                                                                                                           THOSE  PETROS
                                                                                                         THE OLD FASHION
                                                                                                                    WAY
                                                                                                   Frank Schulterbrandt  1/25/2011

 

 

     Well as you may know Petrochromis is by far one of the most aggressive fish out of  lake Tanganyika when kept in the home aquaria.

 It is for the above reason that I decided to try and breed a smaller variant of petros the “OLD FASHION WAY”. This way of breeding

   

     I used a 30 gallon tank (3 footer) , egg crating as a partition, and one male and one female Famula Bangwe. The tanks only had a

little sand and one sponge filter one each side of the partition. At first they would try to attack each other even with the egg crating

separating them. Well after a month the female was holding ..... and I striped her after 14 days of holding. The amount of free

swimmers were low ... so I assumed that some of the eggs were not fertilized or picked up by the female because of the egg crating.

  

     I will try this experiment again , but this time I will use a 40 gallon long tank (4 footer) and divided it into three equal compartments by using egg-crating. I will placed a male in the middle compartment and one female in each of the outside compartments. I will use gravel this time because the sand just got swept away.

 

    Then I will try this with a slightly larger petro variant, say my Ortho Tri-Colors Chimba which I only have a WC trio.
I will have to use rocks, bricks to keep the egg-crating in place , because the greatest fear here is the egg-crating being knocked over,

Which would mean death to one of the petros. If this is successful, I will put this to the full test. So whenever I get a small quantity of a WC petro variant , I will attempt to get offspring first using the above technique first before I put them together.

 

 

 

To be continued