Lateral Line December 2011 - Hill Country Cichlid Club

6
Aulonocranus dewindti “Zambia”: A Spawning Report
- Benjamin L. Smith
A beautiful male Aulonocranus dewindti in the author’s aquarium.
Aulonocranus dewindti is a cichlid of Lake
Tanganyika found in the intermediate habitat
1 . It fits the bill of both a sand sifter as
well as a featherfin. Like most other
featherfins, the males display lustrous colors
when courting which they can turn off and
on like a light. Unlike Cyathopharynx, they
will tend to carry at least some color all of
the time making it easy to differentiate the
males from females in adult populations.
The tips of the ventral fins have a hint of
yellow, however they do not have the lappets
that the Ophthalmotilapia ventralis and
Ophthalmotilapia nasuta use as egg dummies.
The variant I kept was from Dave's
Rare Aquarium Fish and sported horizontal
blue and yellow stripes. In Ad Konings'
books, there are images of a fish from
Mabilibili that appear to have a dark copper
base with blue stripes and are quite stunning
2 .
The waters the fish hails from is like that of
most of the lake in that it is alkaline and
hard. The tap water at my home is the same
so no adjustments are necessary other than
dechlorinator. The temperatures range in the
upper 70 O F in the lake and the tank temperatures
at my home range from 73-75 O F.
The slightly lower temperature doesn't seem
to affect spawning frequency, though I have
noted that in the tanks which I heat to 78 O F,
the time for the fry to become free swimming
drops from 3 weeks to 2 weeks.
In the wild, the fish sifts sand searching for
invertebrates. In my tank they were fed a
staple diet flake. The fry were initially fed