Breeding and Parental Care
Like several other tilapiine cichlids, the spotted mangrove cichlid is notable for its adaptability and prolific breeding. Spotted mangrove cichlids breed when they are about 150mm long and generally breed year long with peaks in November, March–April and July–September. They lay up to 1800 eggs usually on submerged logs, rocks or plants and the eggs hatch after approximately three days.
Spotted mangrove cichlids are monogamous fish who engage in biparental care, and research has found that the size of the eggs tend to increase with the amount of parental care. The males and females both have very specific roles in parenting and work together to ensure the well being of their offspring. The females prepare the nest by clearing an area on rocky substrate. After spawning, the females take care of all embryo tending while males stay about two to three meters away and remain mostly inactive except for an occasional feeding or chasing away of predators. When the offspring become two to three days old they rise off the nest and form a school. This causes a dramatic change in parental role as the male becomes active and the female begins to spend more time away from the young, guarding ahead of the school by chasing away predators. Parental care continues until the fish are about 2.5–3 cm. This biparental behaviour could help explain why black mangrove cichlids are able to live in many different habitats and become dominant over other fish populations in the same area.
Read more about this topic: Spotted Tilapia
Famous quotes containing the words breeding and, breeding, parental and/or care:
“Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (16941773)
“Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (16941773)
“The most important emotional accomplishment of the toddler years is reconciling the urge to become competent and self-reliant with the longing for parental love and protection.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“You cant, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?”
—Joseph Conrad (18571924)