Many aquarists like you enjoy keeping cichlids in their fish tank because of their different shapes and vibrant colors. Before long, just having them in their aquarium is not enough, fish lovers want to breed cichlids on their own. In fact, cichlid breeding is an interesting process to watch because of 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.
Most African Cichlids are mouthbrooders. In other words, the female African Cichlid will hold the eggs in their mouth. First, you need to get your breeding colony. Often, when a female cichlid is ready to mate, all the male cichlids will turn very aggressive and will often fight over her. Or, if you have only a pair, the male may be too aggressive towards the one available female, resulting in stress and potential death. Instead, you may want to keep 3 females for every male in your cichlid tank. This will keep the males busy chasing multiple females and let the females a chance to recover from being chased when breeding.
The African Cichlids breeding colony will love to have a good environment with plenty of caves, rocks, shelves and crevices which they can choose as their territory and breeding ground. Don’t bother to put any aquarium plants as they will be removed by the cichlids. It is equally important to feed your African Cichlids well to get them into their breeding condition. Spirulina flakes and occasional earthworm are excellent quality food for your African Cichlids.
When breeding time comes, the male will chase after the female and it will do a mating dance which consists of shimmying in front of the female. The female will lay eggs and then pick them up in their mouth. The male will fertilize the eggs. This whole process is repeated many times until the female loses interest and the male will chase another breeding female and repeat the whole process again.
Those unfertilized eggs will be disposed of. The female cichlid will keep the fertilized eggs in her mouth until they are hatched. This process can take about three to five weeks.
To keep the baby African Cichlids alive, it is important to transfer the female to a smaller tank before the baby cichlids are born. 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.
For the baby cichlids, you can feed them with some fine powder form of flake food. Meantime, it is good to let the female cichlid recover its health before putting her back in the tank. Also, try to keep the babies with cichlids of the same size, lest they become food!
