Mbuna not digging enough?

guppysam said:

Hey so I just filled a tank with 12 juvenile mbunas in it, it has very fine sand as it sediment (close to sea sand) and large river pebbles as is hardscape, no plants at all. It running on a eheim 2213 and I have a nano wavemaker to create some current for them. The weird thing is during the breakdown of my canister I temporarily switched it with a HOB filter and they all started to be more actively digging around but as soon as I switched back the caves they dug are all neglected and they occupy the mid-top water more as compared to the bottom near the rocks which is odd for mbuna.

Is there anything I can do? To encourage such natural behaviour that I really like

Thanks


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Dman911 said:

I would remove the wave maker if its not needed. I found Mbuna to like calmer water. The digging will start a lot more once the males start to mature. They will dig pits and do the shimmy to try and attract the females back to their pit for some lovin. You will also want to provide some barriers like rocks and caves etc. this will help provide preferred spawning areas the dominant male will claim and will also provide some line of sight breaks. What type of Mbuna are you keeping and are you planning to raise the fry? or if it happens it happens kind of thing?


Dan

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guppysam said:

Oh as of now I have reduced the flow from the canister, the wavemaker is there to help eliminate this deadspace at the corner of the tank. Oh I always heard that mbuna like strong currents perhaps the older stronger guys?

The lists of fish I have now would be
1 peacock
4 M. auratus
5 Metriclima estherae
2 yellow labs

I am overstocking the tank ALOT as I couldn't get a big enough tank, if it gets worse I may give away some of them. But I'm planning to breed my auratus as I did before


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Dman911 said:

I wouldn't say strong but I usually kept mine in flow about 4x gph. I kept species tanks for breeding so when the females were holding I didn't want to exhaust them as only the more experienced females manage to sneak in some food while holding.



Dan

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Dman911 said:

Depends on the species but with a multi species tank overcrowding is absolutely fine if you don't mind hybrids (I won't even get into that because I'm to opinionated on it) as long as you can keep the water parameters good. I have seen display tanks with large sumps where you can hardly see though because of the number of fish. Overcrowded I would say in most cases with Mbuna is better than understocked. It really depends on your goals for the tank. They key is to make sure you have enough filtration to convert all ammonia to nitrates and do enough water changes to maintain healthy nitrate levels. The best option to have an over crowded tank is the use of a sump or in my case breading was a closed system with a large sump to aid in filtration as I used sponge filters in the tanks and 2 main air pumps with battery backup. I did water changes every second day but I ran over 20 tanks ranging from 180 gal to 20g gal and a separate rack for 16 fry tanks. It was quite some work about an hour a day between feeding and maintenance and stripping fry and just observing females that were holding then marking the date on the tank with dry erase.



Long gone are those days as it was about 10 yrs ago I shut it down due to a separation.



Dan

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guppysam said:

Wow that's a lot to handle, alright thanks for the advice hopefully by tilting the spray bar higher up the Flow from canister would not be too strong and I think I would reduce the use of the wave maker, I could see some digging and natural behaviour soon

Thanks a lot for your help


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Dman911 said:

What size tank are you running? Its not going to hurt anything to have more flow if you don't have holding females, I just found in tanks with moderate flow they seems to be very natural and females do have to expend extra enegy when holding.



Dan

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guppysam said:

It's a 7 gal tank, yea but they seem to be more actively digging during whislt using the HOB filter with lesser flow so we'll see how it goes


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Dman911 said:

Eeeek! You really need a bigger tank I'm not sure I would keep Mbuna in less than a 40b. Other than maybe pearlmutts or something in a 20g



Dan

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