South American Dwarf Cichlids - Species, Tank Set Up, Feeding, Breeding etc.

Hello there, I'm Richard from Tyne Valley Aquatics and in this video I'm going to talk about South American dwarf cichlids, these little fellas behind me here. Now there's more types of these than I could possibly go into in a short video, but generally they're small, brightly coloured cichlids which require slightly acidic conditions and soft water. These ones here are of the Epistogramma species, these ones are fire red. Epistogramma agassizii, fire red, that's the male there. And this little one here is the female. The vast majority of South American cichlids, the male, like this fella here, is quite a bit bigger and more colourful than the female. That's the male, that's the female there. Much smaller. There's another female down here. And there's one I think is going to spawn in that little cave there. That's another female. See how it's just got one single colour? Some of the species have more colourful females, but not this one. As I mentioned before, the dwarf South American species tend to prefer pH less than seven, ideally around about 6.5, lower for some, especially the wild fish. They like it quite soft. You can do that with bogwood, peat balls, almond leaves, alder cones. There's numerous natural ways to lower the pH. The most important thing is a stable pH. It doesn't have to be Perfectly 6.5, perfectly 6 or whatever, as long as it's stable, that's the main thing. They can live slightly outside the comfort zone. This is a typical setup, apart from it hasn't got many plants on. It's got one just up here, and a suckered piece of bog wood stuck on the side. Generally you would have sand in the bottom, you'd much prefer sand. Bits of bog wood, you know, things like this that you can get underneath, use as little caves. All the dwarfs really love that. As far as spawning goes, they like to either lay their eggs on like a curled up leaf or some sort of cave. This is actually a drilled coconut shell. There's a male Epistogramma cacatuoides. Orange just come out of there. And there's the little female. I think they're breeding in there. They seem to be taking a lot of interest in it and the male generally guards it. Something like that is ideal for them. That's another sort of South American dwarf cichlid. Different species. This is a blue ram. It's either Papiliochromis or Microgeophagus. Depending on which name you like to use. Very bonny fish, don't get very big. Peaceful in a tank, like the same sort of conditions as the epistogrammers. Sand on the bottom, low pH, hence the peat ball here. Planted area, places to spawn, and good varied diet. This is another form of blue ram. This is a bred form called electric blue ram, for obvious reasons. See, the colour on some of these fish is pretty awesome. It gets more intense as they get bigger. Most of the species of South American cichlids, the dwarf ones, will live in with angels, corys, tetras, generally pretty peaceful fish. I mentioned diet before, they'll take a range of flake, pellet, frozen food and live food. We tend to feed ours basically a mixture of all sorts. Although they do like frozen cyclops, as they get bigger they'll take daphnia, tubifex, they'll like pretty much anything. They're not too fussy. If they are fussy, you can try them with live food, especially if you're getting wild fish. They take a while to wean onto prepared foods. The water quality is an issue with these fish. Any high ammonia or nitrite spikes and they may well turn up their toes. In this particular tank, we've got a moving bed filter, which just ensures that there's never any ammonia or nitrite in the tank, even after a heavy feed or an introduction of new fish. So a nice soft, Low pH water that you'd have in an ordinary Amazonian tank, good varied diet, lots of places to hide, sand substrate, few plants and you're away. Not very difficult to keep, make a very attractive addition to your tank. Now when the fish are breeding, they'll like to claim a little bit of territory for their own, in this case that particular shell, anything going in or anywhere near that shell will be chased away. They haven't got teeth, so it's not as if they're going to tear any fins off any of your smaller fish, but they will chase them away. They will protect their fry. When the fry hatch, you can either feed them newly hatched brine shrimp, some of the prepared fry foods, or we've got frozen brine shrimp here in the shop. They seem to do pretty well on that. Some people feed them white worms and so on and such forth. They seem to do very well on live food. Once they get a little bit bigger, they'll start taking prepared food. Here's a few of our fire reds feeding on live daphnia. There's no mad rush to get to them. I know the daphnia is going to be there for a while. They really do seem to like eating it though. So if and when you can get live food, it's nice to give them that as a treat. Or if you're getting them into tip-top breeding condition, I would pretty much say these fellas are breeding condition already. That's just a very brief introduction to South American dwarfs. The last part of the video will just have an example of a few of the types that we have or have had recently in stock.