# mean cichlid stories...



## ron v (Feb 24, 2005)

Loha mentioned in another thread about having convicts beat up some piranha got me to thinking. I'll bet there are some interesting "mean cichlid" stories out there.... I'll start... I once had a pair of A. citrinellum (midas cichlid) spawn on the back side of a rock in a 55 gal tank. I couldn't see the spawn from the front side of the tank and the back glass was painted. So I leaned over the open top aquarium to get look. The male midas came out of the tank and bit me on the nose. It brought blood. Funny now. Not so much when it happened.


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## lohachata (Jan 27, 2006)

i don't know how i missed this thread..but i have a couple of more stories about less than sociable cichlids..
just a few years after i got into the hobby one of the guys in our club was selling his pair of cichlasoma maneguense..(commonly called jaguar cichlids today)...so i went over his house to pick them up...they were housed in a 120 gallon plywood tank and that day they had spawned.as i stood outside of the fishroom door i could see them tending the eggs..the guy and i were talking when we noticed his cat sitting on the steps watching them also..then the cat snuck into the fishroom and up onto a shelf..then over onto the top of the 120.reached it's paw into the tank to try and snag dinner... the male swam up and grabbed the cat's paw and tried to drag it into the tank...that cat let out a yowl and jumped about 2 feet in the air and took off like it got hit with lightning...it never went back down the basement again.....
the other incident happened about 5 or 6 years ago..i had a 75 gallon tank with a few big gold severums ; a 12" red devil and a pair of hemichronis laffalili..(the really red jewels..) the jewels decided to spawn in the front corner of the tank..the severums were smart enough to stay away..but the red devil was only seeing caviar...just before i went to bed the devil was getting driven off by the jewels..when i got home from work the next day i found that they had beaten him to death and were still taking turns attacking the corpse...


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## Blue Cray (Oct 19, 2007)

I've never had luck with cichlids I always get the mean agressive ones without knowing any better. I decided to add a silver arowana to one of my larger tanks which had a divider with a red devil about 10" on the other side, of course the second most expensive fish in the tank had to swim over to the other side, jump the divider and get destroyed by the big red monster. I learned my lesson, I'm not ment to keep cichlids, I never was. 

Oh I'd like to add to this I'm getting rid of my planted tank and getting a breeding pair of jags. Lol.


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## emc7 (Jul 23, 2005)

6, 3/4" calico convicts + 1 5 gallon tank + 1 week = 2 dead convict, 2 tailless convicts, & 2 1" convicts.

I really did laugh out loud from the cat story. My cat hid under furniture when the bird was out after our cockatiel once landed on her back, claws out.


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## petlovingfreak (May 8, 2009)

I bought 12 coreys for one of my aquariums, they were larger albino coreys, i figured they'd be fine, NOPE, as soon as they hit the water my jewel cichlids and tinfoil barbs ate ALL OF THEM! Waste of money there....


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