Cichlasoma Dimerus
- Thread starter fishydude22
- Start date
They are quite common in my area, one of the guys in the aquarium club was breeding them and now they are everywhere... he can't get rid of them at auctions.. a bag of 5 juveniles went for like $2.
I have never kept them but I can relate what I've seen - they grow quickly and are not aggressive (they were not breeding however). they are similar to portalagensis and other acaras, much like a large ram afaik. I would put them in any of my aquariums as long as the other fish could not fit in their mouth
I would't put them in my planted tank
but a friend of mine had 4 in a 65 planted with lots of serpae tetras and sae/cae's.. I have photos somewhere it's quite a nice tank actually.
I have never kept them but I can relate what I've seen - they grow quickly and are not aggressive (they were not breeding however). they are similar to portalagensis and other acaras, much like a large ram afaik. I would put them in any of my aquariums as long as the other fish could not fit in their mouth
I would't put them in my planted tank
but a friend of mine had 4 in a 65 planted with lots of serpae tetras and sae/cae's.. I have photos somewhere it's quite a nice tank actually.
I ask around if I haven't seen or kept them myself - there are some cichlid keepers round here who have a bunch of weird stuff. I also do a bunch of web searchs -I'd normally look at a few of the general cichlid sites, then do google searches on the scientific name. Some fish have a lot of stuff, some have next to nothing, dimerus falls somewhere in the bottom of the middle. Doing a google search on Cichlasoma dimerus gets you stuff like
/www.kcff.net/newworld/cichlasoma/dimerus/gallery.htm
Note the genus is upper case, species all lower case - unfortunately this make a difference. Read German or Dutch - this can be useful. Fortuneately most swedish aquarists publish in English. I find the web rings too hard/time consuming to search thoroughly unfortunately, though I suspect this is much of where the real info changes hands
I find fishbase almost useless. I really only look at it for original location, and max size.
There is a lot of stuff out there, both fish and articles. I got a fish last week from a dealers tank that is a wild caught cichlid from Peru. It was a contaminant with a bunch of Apistogramma 'Blue' (and what the hell is that?!'). I think it's a Burjurquina species, but this is really testing my id skills, especially as I can't find any images of these.
/www.kcff.net/newworld/cichlasoma/dimerus/gallery.htm
Note the genus is upper case, species all lower case - unfortunately this make a difference. Read German or Dutch - this can be useful. Fortuneately most swedish aquarists publish in English. I find the web rings too hard/time consuming to search thoroughly unfortunately, though I suspect this is much of where the real info changes hands
I find fishbase almost useless. I really only look at it for original location, and max size.
There is a lot of stuff out there, both fish and articles. I got a fish last week from a dealers tank that is a wild caught cichlid from Peru. It was a contaminant with a bunch of Apistogramma 'Blue' (and what the hell is that?!'). I think it's a Burjurquina species, but this is really testing my id skills, especially as I can't find any images of these.