My Fish Tank Adventures: We Have Baby Yellow Labs!

In the post Mouth Breeding Fish, I told you our Yellow Labs were having a baby fish fry. Well, the fry is here!

I moved little Momma into a larger breeder net. I felt the breeder box was too confining and keeping her from spitting out her babies. The trick worked. She started spitting the babies out on Sunday and finished Monday night. She has been separated from the community for a little over two weeks now.

From what I can count we have 7-8 babies in the fry. Some are very dark in color. I jokingly told my husband, she probably bred partially with Larry (our Dwarf Tanganyikan):

You can see here Larry is starting to lose his spots. This is the same dark spotted fish I have pictured in the sidebar of the blog. Soon all of the spots will be gone. This fish will be a dark blue fish with a yellowish white stripe.

In reality, I'm sure the Labidochromis Caeruleus did not cross breed with the Duboisi, but it would be interesting to see what would come of it, if they did.

When I saw little Momma eating food I fed to the newborns, I examined her mouth and jaws closely. She did not appear to have any more swelling so I decided it was time for her to leave the nest before she ate her babies.

Given that mouth breeding fish do not eat for the time they have babies in their mouth. I put her in a "recovery room" net. Cichlids are aggressive fish. I do not want her chased, nipped at, or stressed by other fish in the community. Once she gets her strength back I'll release her.

The baby Yellow Labs are really small and hard to capture on camera. If you look closely you can see a few yellow blobs at the bottom of this image and mixed in the breeding bush. Those blobs are the babies!