are my convicts a pair?

Question

Hi...
i have a pair a black convict cichlids.....one bigger one with wavy fins and and a yellowish tummy...and a smaller one with not much wavy fins...their activities seem to be normal....and they act as a pair...they dig together...but i just have a liitle doubt as the bigger one has a yellowish tummy... know all i know is that usually females have a yellowish tummy and they are smaller in size......and that the males are bigger in size and have wavy fins... but here my male convict has a yellowish tummy......is it male or female or something else.....Are my convicts a pair of male and female??

Answer 1

You might have an issue with the sizes - A larger female will 80% of the time reject any male smaller then she.

Then the opposite way round is just as tricky as a larger male might just kill the smaller less active female.

Convicts are mognanamous (partners for life) but the male will always have the chance to kill the female- in nature the pair are aggressive in mating and very aggressive protecting the fry - any time the male sees a female he thinks she is ready to mate and if she is not then he might just kill her for being in his territory.



*Personally I'd separate either via a divider or preferably a different tank (your going to need another tank for the fry as the parents might eat after a certain size anyway) and fatten up the male, you'll know when he is ready (I have a male that practically jumps out of the water to splash and he moves around any ornaments tapping them against anything to make noise) then re-introduce them to each other for a few days at a time but remove if he gets too aggressive. (The male I have killed 4 females before I learnt all of this) They are cool fish with a bad reptutation mostly from people getting bad advice or watching in horror as they eat everything in the tank - I have seen convicts fend off Oscars, JD's Terrors the lot..

Answer 2

Sounds like you have a large female and a small male.



The yellow (orange) tummy is the best indicator that it is female, and the lack of it indicates male. All other indicators are not at all reliable. Especially in Convicts, fin length/trailing does not have much to do with a Convict being male/female at all, plenty of females have extremely long fin trailing, and vice versa for males. Same with the shape of fins. Wavy or curved or straight or whatever, doesn't really work with Convicts. The size could be because the male is younger than the female (not sure if that's true), but it's not that unusual either for a female to be larger than the male. Just all depends on how dominant the female is compared to the male.



Do they hang around each other a lot? Are they cleaning a place to lay eggs? Do they dig pits? Sounds like yeah, they are indeed a pair.



[EDIT]



For the love of god don't separate them! Dividers are for pairs that are very aggressive towards each other, yours seem to have already paired up and doing fine together. Don't fix something that's not broken, it may just break it. Let them be and if they're female and male, they will breed.

Answer 3

Convicts are no longer friendly to something they think of will threaten their fry. Tiger barbs will initiate investigating the completed tanks so which you will see some scuffles. If the tank is desperate as much as permit for territorial boundries you could desire to smash out with including 6 of them.