Hey everyone - sorry I have not been posting very much. I was off on vacation and had limited access to the internet. However, just thought I would pass along that the yellow lab I mentioned was holding spit out her fry while I was gone. I came home to 17 little ones and they all seem to be doing great. My daughter loves them.

congrats!

hey miami what kind of fry??

labidichromis... electric yellow cichlid.... all yellow with black on the dorsal fin.
:-)
Brandon

Yeah, like poetic said - it is a very popular cichlid. My dominant male is the prettiest fish in the tank. He really colored up nicely. If you click on my profile you will see some pics of my yellow labs although they are not the best shots.

I also have a red zebra (actually an orange colored cichlid) that is holding so I am going to remove her to a separate tank until she spits out the fry.

In terms of parenting, I removed the mom from the fry tank and put her back in the main tank so the fry are all by themselves. The mom will only remain a good parent for a while and then you are at risk for her eating them.

hmm... i started out with 5 labs, and now i have over 30 specimens in that tank... i never took out the parents or anything... labs are herbivours and as long as there are fed they wont eat thier young... they will actually still protect them... they punked one of my synodontis multipictactus to death once... the only mbuna that i've seen eat thier own young was a colony of a. melachromis... and peacocks...

mbuna usually want to build up a huge healthy colony in the wild... so they will protect thier young and out grow neighboring colonies of fish... so if you have a colony of p. demasoni and c. labidochromis one will out grow the other and take over the tank... the larger colony will even breed more than the other...