Aulonocara stuartgranti Maisoni
Aulonocara stuartgranti Maisoni come from Lake Malawi. I have
been told they are collected in the same area of the lake as
Aulonocara Maulana ( Bi-color) in the northeast part of the
lake. I tend to believe this based on our experiences with the
fish. Unfortunately, we had to learn the hard way.
Our first experience was with buying 3 wild pairs from an
importer. We ended up with 3 Maisoni males, two bi-color males
and one female ( I don’t know which). That was no big problem as
we can sell nice colored males all day long.
Next we purchased three more wild pairs from an unsuspecting
GCCA member. Being burnt with the first three pairs, we decided
to put the first female in with the new ones. Somewhere along
the line we lost one of the four females and was now down to
three. A good friend of ours, John Oyer, just happened to have
purchased some from the GCCA member we bought the three pair
from. Unfortunately for him after growing the fry for several
months, a nice looking cross between a bi-color and a maisoni
resulted.
This was not good for us. We had those parents ! A friend of
ours just happened to have some testosterone flake and gave me
some to use. We fed the three females this flake and sure enough
two turned out to be bi-colors and one was a maisoni. We sold
the maisoni pair. Now once again we had no maisoni.
We bought two more wild pairs. One pair was presold and the
other we sold shortly after. One of the guys that bought a pair,
swore after it grew up some, he didn’t have a female. He brought
her back and we gave him 3 / 2" for a replacement. These two
inch ones are ones we bought from a well known breeder in the
Detroit area. They are just now starting to color and they do
appear to be the correct fish so far.
While we have been waiting for these to mature, we took the
plunge one more time and convinced our friend in Florida, who
imported many and tested twenty of these fish to be true maisoni
to sell us ten. He said a good number turned out to be bi-color
females that he put in his bi-color pond for breeding. Thank God
we now can say we are breeding the correct fish.
Buying wild peacocks should not be for everyone. Another good
example was the lemon jake. There are thousands of crosses on
the market because people unknowingly breed the wrong females to
the males. Now people can’t understand why the lemon jake
doesn’t look so good or as good as it use to. The correct lemon
jake female has an almost oval shape. How many have you seen
that are not oval ? Guess what ?
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