Interspecies Courtship

[jwcarlson]

Kind of a weird topic, but thought I'd ask.
I recently relocated my discus into a 125 that has a bunch of juvenile sterbai and a single gold ram. There were a couple other male rams in there with him, but they've been moved. So he has had no buddies for quite awhile. They all got along and he was always colored up for them. So, he's been a significantly more dull since.

Immediately when I added the discus, he colored right back up and has been hanging around with them. And he seems to have taken a shine to one of the discus. He's also started to aggressively clean the terracotta dish that's in there and he's never had any interest in it before. Last night he was sitting in the dish and shimmying/shaking at the discus he seems to like the most which happened to have been nearby. It's an interesting dynamic and it's been pretty fun to observe.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this?

[brewmaster15]

Jacob,

I think your Gold Ram is saying...yo... Buddy, I am desperate here can you ask one of your fish friends to send a few girlfriends my way,

Afraid I haven't seen anything like that but I have had Discus Raise Angelfish Fry. The Discus accepted the fry fine and raised them as their own.

posted on it here..

https://forum.simplydiscus.com/showt...+angelfish+fry

Looks like I need to dig up the vids and repost them.. Its pretty cool.

[jwcarlson]

I had just one single furcata rainbowfish that came in a shipment of CPDs in error. So he grew up with these little fish and he's 4x their size. He would relentlessly "dance" for the CPD female... sex ratio was all off so I think she used him to keep the males off of her. I've since had him father a few babies before the female I brought in croaked for no apparent reason.

I could certainly see fish that have parental care "adopting" different fry and raising them as their own.

Hopefully there's some pictures in the thread still even if the videos don't work, pretty neat experience though. This cracked me up:

They have not been coached or trained to raise Angelfish fry.

[brewmaster15]

I had just one single furcata rainbowfish that came in a shipment of CPDs in error. So he grew up with these little fish and he's 4x their size. He would relentlessly "dance" for the CPD female... sex ratio was all off so I think she used him to keep the males off of her. I've since had him father a few babies before the female I brought in croaked for no apparent reason.

I could certainly see fish that have parental care "adopting" different fry and raising them as their own.

Hopefully there's some pictures in the thread still even if the videos don't work, pretty neat experience though. This cracked me up:

Videos are back in the thread..
https://forum.simplydiscus.com/showt...renamed/page10