TROPICAL Firemouths

It’s up there as one of the best old school cichlids for the larger community, but did you know it also makes a great breeding project too? Gabor Horvath explains.

GABOR HORVATH

A Hungarian aquarist now living in the UK, Gabor is a prolific fish breeder, project undertaker and writer.

WE’VE ALL been there. You set up a community tank, fill it up with mixed populations of various shoaling fish, and it’s only when you sit back to enjoy your ‘completed’ aquarium that you realise something’s missing. You’ve got heaps of movement, the fish are all sparkling, but still the tank seems to lack a focal point. That’s usually the time we start some post-hoc thinking about stocking, and our minds turn to a centrepiece fish.

In smallish tanks, many aquarists fall back on the tried and tested fillers of dwarf cichlids or diminutive gourami to plug the gaps, being mostly peaceful and (this is the important part) highly visible. But finding the right-sized peaceful equivalent for a more spacious community setup can be problematic. Problematic, that is, until you meet the mild tempered Firemouth cichlids. This is my own story of how I met two related, yet so different, members of the Thorichthys genus.

Keeping it real

My first encounter with the ‘real’ Firemouth cichlid, Thorichthys meeki, happened almost three decades ago, when I was still at university and sharing a dormitory room with two classmates. The limited space (and the reservations of my roommates) allowed me to have only one aquarium, and after getting a special permission for a fish tank from the dormitory ‘director’ I decided to set it up for medium sized cichlids, plus some livebearers as companions and dither fish.

Following a long search (there weren’t many fish shops in Hungary in the 90s) I managed to buy two Firemouth cichlids and hoped to form a pair. Back then they were called Cichlasoma meeki, because almost every cichlid from the Central-American region was considered to belong to the Cichlasoma genus at that time.

Unfortunately, my pair turned out to be two females, so I had to give up any hope of breeding them. Then to my great surprise I found that one of the females had paired up with another ex-Cichlasoma male in the tank – a Convict cichlid, now Amatitlania nigrofasciata. They spawned and raised their young like any other cichlid couple.

I know many folks frown upon hybridising (as do I now), but as a young aquarist I felt like I’d achieved something special, and not having the Internet to check if anyone else had managed this feat, I started to prepare my speech for the Nobel-prize. After speaking to an expert aquarist who confirmed that it’s not a one-off occasion I was brought back to Earth.