Proud Parents

Ben and I are now proud parents, although I didn't want to say anything about it until we were absolutely sure. We became positive yesterday. And it's a boy and a boy and a boy and a boy...and maybe a few girls in there, too. But with the pH, we think there are probably more boys than girls. That's right, our Kribensis fishies did their dance, and yesterday was the first time we saw the babies.

There they were, a little cloud of probably 40 to 50 wee ones (2 mm long?) swimming around along the gravel under the careful oversight of mom and dad. As strange as it sounds, it was adorable. Kribensis are a type of dwarf African cichlid and are known to be good parents, and we got to see this in action. The young parents have been taking turns watching over the kids and leading them around the tank. The most interesting part was their reaction to us cleaning the tank.

Here is a clip of the parents with their babies sitting on the doorstep to the house. The babies are the little specks wiggling around. You'll get the idea after only a few seconds, but the whole clip (about 2 min.) is there for anyone who just loves to watch fish.

We had been planning on doing it yesterday because it will be almost a week and a half until the next time we'll be able to do it again. (We also had planned to transfer them out of the quarantine tank into the larger tank. Then we found babies, and plans changed.) The babies in there made cleaning significantly harder--we didn't want to accidentally siphon up any fry. With the removal of the house decoration (the "cave" in which the parents had settled them in for the night), the babies got scattered from their school. Soon enough, we could tell that mom and dad were looking around for them and gathering them in a dip in the gravel. But we didn't see exactly how they did it until the tank was put back together and there were just a few stragglers that hadn't made it back to their hiding spot. The parents were hunting around for any extras when we saw them find the last few. When an adult found a baby, he or she sucked it into its mouth to later deposit back with the group. Animals never cease to make me marvel.

One problem: we won't be around for a few days. This is fine for the mature fish, but not so good for little ones. Oh, well...we don't have very much tank space anyway. So, if they do survive, does anyone want some fish in a couple of months?