How to Breed African Cichlids

Many aquarists love to watch the cichlids breed because it is interesting to watch their parental behavior and highly organized breeding activities. Cichlid breeding parental brood care falls into one of three categories: open brooding, cave brooding, and mouthbrooding.

As for African Cichlids, most of them are mouthbrooders. Basically, the female African Cichlid will hold the eggs in her mouth.

You start with a breeding colony. It is good to keep a ratio of 3 females to 1 male in your cichlid tank. This helps keep the male cichlids busy chasing many females and allow the females to take a rest from being chased during breeding.

A good environment with plenty of caves, rocks, shelves and crevices which they can choose as their territory and breeding ground is great for African Cichlids. It is critical to feed your African Cichlids well and properly so that they can get into their breeding condition. Quality food like Spirulina flakes and occasional earthworm are great for your African Cichlids.

During breeding period, the male chases the female by doing a mating dnace which consists of shimmying in front of the female. Then, the female lays the eggs and pick them up in their mouth. Fertilization of the eggs is done by the male. This cycle will be repeated several times until the female is tired and loses interest. The male will start to chase another female to start the whole process again.

The female cichlid will keep only the fertilized eggs in her mouth until they are hatched. This whole cycle will take about 3 to 5 weeks.

Before the baby African Cichlids are born, the female is transferred to a smaller tank. If not, the adult cichlids will eat them. When babies are born, move the babies to a fry tank before the mother cichlid eats them.

You can feed the baby cichlids with some fine powder form of flake food. At theis moment. it is advisable let the female cichlid recover its health before putting her back in the tank.

On the whole, breeding cichlids is a very satisfying and challenging hobby. Hence, it is very important that you know the secrets of taking care of your cichlids. To learn more about how to take real good care of these cichlids, get more information at Cichlid Secrets.