Social Behavior
Mbuna exhibit strong social behavior and establish a clearly visible social hierarchy including well defined and enforced territories. A dominate male will maintain a spherical territory only allowing females to enter this territory for breeding purposes. Over-crowding helps spread out the aggression caused by these territorial conflicts. By over crowding, it is possible to break down these barriers and create an environment where no particular individual gets bullied to death. They are maternal mouthbrooders and breed readily in good conditions. Most species thrive in colonies made up of 1M and 3-5F. This allows the gravid females to hide peacefully until gestation by dispersing the males advances throughout the harem.
Read more about this topic: Mbuna
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or behavior:
“There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.”
—Freda Adler (b. 1934)