Cyprichromis Leptosoma &

 Paracyprichromis Nigripinnis

By Rick Boester

Feb. 2004

By now many people have experienced these beautiful mouthbrooding cichlids from Lake Tanganyika. They come in many flavors and sizes. My favorite comes Kitumba.

The tri-color or as many call them now, the black bee, comes a close second and third has to be Paracyprichromis nigripinnis. Many people don’t realize that tri-colors can hale from multiple locations in the lake.

Cyprichromis can throw a variety of different colored tails and sometimes body color  from the same collecting area. Most have blue, yellow, orange or black tails. I have also seen some with white tails. Blue and yellow seem to be the most prevalent.

My first experience with “cyps” was in 1970. Nope that is not a typo, it was actually 34 years ago. They came from a friend of mine that owned “The House of Fancy Guppies” in Fort Wayne, In. named Phil Troyer. He can also be credited for getting me in to frontosa but that is a whole story in itself. Funny that 34 years later I still like fronts and cyps and still carry several locations.

One would think in 34 years I would have seen these fish spawn several times. That is not the case. Last week was the first time I actually saw and watched them spawn, which prompted me to write this article. The cyps I watched spawn were from Kekese. This is a beautiful what I call blue flash type. They come in two different tail colors, blue and yellow, but Monica and I only breed the yellow tails with each other in hopes to produce more yellow tails. The more you breed one colored tail fin cyp with each other the more the offspring also carry the same colored tail. We happen to like the yellow tail the best. The actually spawning lasted about 20 minutes. They did spawn in mid water as many people have professed. The female would drop 3 eggs and then pick them up almost instantly. The male on all most every occasion was on the other side of the tank when she layed. She would then nip at the yellow ventral fins of the male ( I assume this is when fertilization was taking place ) while the male quivered so fast it hardly looked like he was moving. After a couple of nips from the female, he would run off a male to the other end of the tank and she would lay 3 more eggs. Back he came and then the nipping started all over again. I watched her drop 18 eggs and pick them up, all in mid water. Later, when I took the fry 2 weeks later, she had 11 fry. The whole fertilization acts lasted almost two hours. I don’t know why so long when she spawns so quickly. Maybe she does this to appease the male as he does go bananas and wants as much as he can get. Actually he was still trying to get her to nip his fins the next day also. Many times we will have two or three girls holding at near the same time but not this time. She was the only one that spawned

Cyps are easy to strip if you know what you are doing. The best way to strip a cyp is keep her under water in a bucket, hold her gill plates between your index finger and your thumb, and gently press the bottom of her mouth with your other index finger and the fry come swimming right out. I know several people who have lost females from stress of stripping them by trying to open her mouth with an object. That doesn’t work well for us with cyps. Cyps seem to lose their body slime real easy if you handle them too much, causing stress which many times leads to sudden death.

I had to throw paracyps in this short article also because I have never seen a male hold fry until the other day. I actually have some poor pictures of males holding fry. We decided to give our colony of paracyps a 125 gallon tank to themselves and let them spit fry in the tank. On two occasions I have witnessed and photographed males that are carrying the free swimming fry after the female has incubated the eggs. I don’t know anyone who has written this before or experienced this so I don’t know if this is a natural act for them or if we just have a couple strange males that like to help. It is probably pretty natural as I reported around 1985 of Xenotilapia flavipinnis doing this. Koning’s reported that gobies do this also. The first time I told anyone that my (before Monica ) wild male Mpimbwe also held eggs, they thought I was crazy also. All I can say is that seeing is believing. I wonder how many others have seen these things we so rarely hear about ?