"Sokar" wrote in message
...
The local pet stores, Petsmart, ect., do not charge their water parameters
for their cichlid fish, but please note that they want to sell you water
conditioners, pH adjusters for your tank, and special dietary food for
your fish in your "special" African tank.

Marketing rules, "profits are us" rules, are meant to be broken.


I personally don't buy fish from shops like Wal*Mart, or any other shop
that sells "Mixed Africans". When N. leleupi were first imported, they were
kept in soft water. None of the imported fish lived longer than a year. The
people here thought they required the same water conditions as the West
African cichlids they'd imported in the past.
Hardier fish like many of the Mbuna can be acclimated to different water
conditions and be mixed with other fish. And if you feed them the wrong
thing and they die, well that's a four dollar fish dead. If you buy a
Cyathopharynx foae and mix it with the wrong fish and it gets stressed and
dies, well now you've killed a hundred dollar fish. Your views on water
conditions and mixing may change a bit. These are fish you'll not find
currently at places like Wal*mart.
If you're so sure it's only a marketing ploy, I think we should conduct
a test. Go purchase yourself some Xenotilapia sp "papilio" from Lake
Tanganyika and acclimate them to a tank with a pH of about 6 and a hardness
below three. Then toss a few Melanochromis in the tank. By your thinking,
you'll have nothing to worry about, the fish will thrive and be happy so
long as you pack enough fish in there. If you can get them to live say 6 X.
sp "papilio" and 6 M. auratus in a 55 gallon tank with no deaths for a year,
I'd be willing to pay for the fish. ;-)
Being uneducated in the interactions between certain species and having
a few fish live together for more than a month, does not make you an expert.
I don't claim to be an expert myself, but I've lost fish when I started by
mixing incompatible species, and I've lost fish to improper water
parameters. I prefer to research now and keep my fish in their proper
environments to protect my investment.
Tim
www.fishaholics.org