20 gallon long Lake Malawi Cichlid Tank

Notes from October, 1997:

I recently set this tank up for my 6 Labidochromis kingsleyi (I'm not sure about the name yet), who are now between 1/2" and 1" long. I have no idea what they will look like when they get bigger. Right now, they are milk chocolate/clear pink with vertical brownish stripes and a very black horizontal band running along their dorsal fin. They're very cute. They spend all of their time darting from under one rock or decoration to under another, and I have never actually seen them swim out into the open water, except for a split second to gobble a food flake. I'm not sure why they're so reclusive, but it's probably a simple survival mechanism. If anyone knows anything about this species of fish, please let me know - I haven't been able to find them in any of my fish related books or resources. Also, if anyone knows of any plants or other fish that can coexist with african cichlids, I'd be interested in finding out.

There's a slight chance they they've been misidentified. So for now, I'm feeding them some veggie flakes and some cichlid flakes, with an occasional bloodworm snack. They will under no circumstances come to the surface of the water to feed, so I have to sink the flakes, which is pretty wasteful - most of them float away. I can't wait for them to grow! Notes as of October, 1999:

Gosh, I guess it's been a while since I updated this page! I have four of the fish above with me still - I had three males and three females, but over the years one of each died (from aggression related stress). For a long time I had a family of Julidochromis transcriptus living in the tank with the above fish. The Julies successfully defended an area of rocks and produced offspring. I still have some of them. This summer, we decided to give the Julies their own 20 gallon long tank, because we thought more offspring would survive that way. They are now happily breeding away, and I have 3 adults, about 30 1" or so fish, and a number of teeny babies.

The 55 gallon tank, meanwhile, has become the home for several other species of africans in addition to the Labidochromis above. I got these cichlids from Doug Varney last year, when he decided to shift his focus from cichlids to almost exclusively Rainbowfish breeding. I don't know the names of the species off hand, but we have some that are entirely yellow with a sort of uppy "tough guy" mouth, and some that are ice blue with a black doral fin that are really aggressive. We also have a pair of Pseudotropheus greshaki who are semi-permanently separated because the male has almost killed the female at least 4 times (she was a "regular" in the hospital tank until I finally decided that she needed her own residence permanently). I also have a single ? livingstoni who showed signs of aggression when a friend borrowed him, but has been utterly peaceful in my tank. I also have a species that is a smaller cichlid who is a beautiful solid blue color. Lastly, I have several Labeotropheus fuelleborni - 3 females, 2 males and a bunch of babies. They have an adorable overbite and are peaceful, but hold their own against all the other fish - never a fin nipped! The females are "orange-blotch" (I call them my "halloween fish", and the males vary from solid light blue to dark blue with faint stripes. They have yellowish fins. The subdominant and juvenile males often look like females with a blue overcast in their body, but the dominant males are pretty easy to identify. I'll post the names of the rest of the species when I find that slip of paper.. :-)

There are no live plants in the tank except a film of large duckweed which grows well on the surface. I was hoping that since they Malawi cichlids eat a fair amount of vegetable matter in the wild that they'd snack on the duckweed, but it doesn't seem to be happening, so I scoop handfuls off every so often and feed it to the goldfish. I used to have some elodea floating in the tank too, but they nibbled it to death and it didn't seem to grow fast enough to keep up.

The substrate is dolomite, generously given to me by a fellow fishkeeper and TFCB member Max. It theoretically dissolves slowly into the water to help regulate the pH. In reality, I've seen the pH get as low as 6.4 (yellow on the bromothymol blue test) in a few cases where I've neglected the tank for long periods of time (tsk tsk!!). The fish, strangely enough, have never shown signs of illness or stress when the pH dropped so low - although they would gradually eat less. After the water change, they'd perk up a whole lot. I've been much better about water changes lately. I add some SeaChem cichlid salts when I change their water - I really like that product. Since you only use a few teaspoons, it lasts a while, and there aren't a lot of simple salts in it - just what is necessary to raise the hardness and pH. I dissolve what I need into a small container of hot/warm water, and then dribble it in in doses as I refill the tank with a hose.

The tank is filtered by a whisper wet dry filter (1 chamber on each side.. I forgot the model number), and by an old skilter filter (one chamber) without the skimming on. I had it "skimming" for a while, but it was noisy and never produced anything. I inherited the filters with the tank. They aren't ideal for this situation - they circulate little water and get clogged more quickly than I'd like. Ideally, I'd put an aquaclear 300 on the tank, but since these filters are free and seem to be doing fine, I haven't bothered to replace them.

For "decorations", we got a whole bunch of blue-ish slate from a local farm where they were blasting, and after wiping each one down with vinegar and soaking the whole batch in water/vinegar for a few days, we added them to the tank. Since we want hardness, it's not critical that we treated the rocks with vinegar - we mostly did it to kill surface stuff and perhaps leach out random minerals that might be harmful - who knows. We used the slate pieces to build a wall that takes up about 2/3 of the tank - it goes from the gravel up to about 2/3 of the height, and also takes up most of the middle of the tank front to back, so that there are only little channels in the front and back for swimming. We tried not to have the stones resting on the vertical glass panes. It took a while to build the structure so that it was stable. It's a REAL PAIN to remove the rocks, and it's utterly impossible to catch any fish unless they're on death's doorstep, without removing the rocks, so we tend not to do a lot of fish swapping in and out of this tank.

Over the years, we've moved a few females out that I thought were holding eggs. One of the Labidochromis females is now in a 10 gallon tank with some babies who are growing out, as are two yellow females. I was hoping that they'd have better luck raising their young in a small peaceful tank, but I haven't seen any young. Next time I try it, I'll give the mom a tank of her very own, without 1" fry around to snarf down the newborns.

Last Modified October 26, 1999