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My
Experience Keeping and Breeding Frontosa
Frontosa are a
very large, peaceful mouthbrooding cichlid that come from Lake Tanganyika.
Frontosa live in the very deep waters of Tanganyika and feed on
other fish at night.
Since frontosa can
get up to 14 inches in length, a large tank will be needed for adults.
When rearing them, a 55 gallon tank is fine. The water in Lake
Tanganyika has a higher pH and hardness than that of Lake Malawi. I
have had luck rearing young frontosa with Malawi cichlids by keeping the
pH around 8.0 and the degrees of hardness around 10. This is the
lower end of these parameters for the frontosa and the upper end for
cichlids from Lake Malawi.
Frontosa are
hunters in the wild and should be fed a diet of frozen or dried krill or
beef heart. In my experience, they seem to prefer the frozen krill.
I have fed them red rubies and guppies on occasion, but was always afraid
of introducing parasites to a fish I had kept for years. Feeding
live fish also dirties up the water pretty quickly.
Breeding frontosa
is very difficult. One of the main reasons is that the fish must be
3 or 4 years old before they will breed. You will need a male with 3
or 4 females. Adult frontosa are very expensive. Small
frontosa are not cheap either, around $50 last time I bought any.
I have never
successfully bred frontosa. I started with 8 young frontosa,
purchased from 3 different breeders. They all made it to about 2 1/2
years of age when we had a week long power outage in my Midwest town
during the middle of the winter. Since I have a gas hot water
heater, I still had access to hot water. I did a 50% water change
each morning before work and each evening all week long. In
addition, I tied insulation around the tank to slow the loss of heat from
the tank. By the time the power came back on I was down to 3
frontosa. About a month later, another one died. I guess it
never quite got over the trauma of the extreme temperature changes every
day. The two remaining fronts are in the pictures above.
Since you will be
feeding the frontosa meat, it is nice to have scavengers in the tank.
The synodontis catfish makes a perfect tank mate. It is a spotted
catfish from Lake Tanganyika and can be seen in the background in the
pictures above. |
