Ivanacara Adoketa adopts vieja zonatus fry

[Aquatopia]

I've been Dying to post this here where somebody might get a kick out of this.
Here's the short story. I set up this 40 l for my 4 adoketa at my store to try to get a pair out of them. After a short while the tank also housed a few other residents for show. I have a 125 in the window with some Prolific Vieja Zonatus who've hatched about 500 fry. Since I'm already raising 250 of them from the last month I decide to start feeding the fry to my store fish. Enter Adoketa! I dumped 30 or so fry in the tank- the fish went crazy. A. Cacatuoid was eating 2 at a time Adoketa momma tried one, spit it out immediately, rushed the other fish eating them and rounded up the other fry and claimed them as her own. It's now a week later and she still has 17 of the fry and her mate also cares for them. She Mouth cleans them, chews up food and spits it at them and guides them around the tank for feeding.

These fry (if you don't know zieja zonatus) will grow 30 times her size.. lol. On the bright side, maybe caring for these babies will inspire her to actually make some of her own after I take them away- I just can't do it yet- It's too cool to watch.
HEre are some videos you might enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsTKjTNxU0A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdIsqkMFfrU

In the last one you can see the cacatuoid munching fry and the blacklightning movements of the adoketa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR7bGF_E95g

Kind Regards,
Brian

 

[magpie]

That is incredibly fascinating... are they a wild pair? I've heard about certain birds adopting other babies when say, another bird takes over their nest and lays eggs in it. I wonder if this would ever happen with wild fish, say a parent gets killed... I guess it would be rare, though, that both parents would be killed or pulled away from the fry for this to happen.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Mike Wise]

Cichlids can be fascinating in their behavior, can't they?

 

[Aquatopia]

I have done this before with other fish and they always killed the babies nomatter what they looked like- and that was the point- to eat these little fry. I'm pretty sure the pair were going to lay soon after I fed them the fry because they had been building different nest sites. The male is the smaller of the two ( he is younger) the fem I got from a far away trade but I don;t think she's wild. I just hope it doesn;t mess her head up when she has babies of her own. The fry are starting to get big now.. this could get interesting!

 

[gerald]

Ken McKaye reported nicaraguense in the wild adopting fry of dovii, a larger predator, after their own nest was raided by Neetroplus, their main competitor for spawning sites. McKaye theorized that dovii was the main predator of Neetroplus, so that in the long-run the nicaraguense would benefit from having more dovii around. Not everybody agreed with him about nicaraguense's "motives" and benefits, but nonetheless the cross-species parental can happen even in wild cichlids.