Tips on Tropheus

Tropheus Kiriza

I wanted to expand upon my Tropheus article.  Just some quick tips to help improve one's ability to successfully keep Tropheus.  These tips were developed over the years by me and greatly assist me in avoiding losses.  I hope you find them beneficial.

I'm sure many of you have tried and given up on keeping Tropheus. Lord knows I have almost thrown in the towel myself. Hopefully you will find this useful and, more importantly, it will keep your Tropheus alive.

Over the years I have learned a few things that work pretty well. By no means is this a comprehensive list. It is meant to help you successfully prepare and care for your Tropheus once they arrive. This has worked for me, others may have different thoughts.

1) ALWAYS expect bloat when you get your fish in from whoever you buy them from. I repeat ALWAYS! In my experience bloat hits juvi's much worse than adults. Adults seem to take travel much better. You should consider this when making your initial purchase.

2) ALWAYS get some of the food that the shipper is feeding them, this will help you to avoid giving them new food and causing them to bloat. You should slowly wean them off of whatever they are eating and feed them spirulina flakes/pellets only. HBH and OSI make a great flake.

3) ALWAYS have metro ready to treat the tank for bloat. I have found that it works very well if you soak their food in some dissolved metro the first few days after you get them and then feed them. Tropheus will eat like pigs when you first get them so it is a good way to get the metro into their system. This should nip bloat before it begins.

4) NEVER order Tropheus unless you have lots of metro on hand. If you wait to order it when you see bloat appears, by the time your metro arrives, you fish will be too far gone.

5) Over filtration is best for Tropheus. They are pigs and need clean water. If you over-filtrate you can do a water change every 2-3 weeks and it's no problem.

If you feed metro right off the bat and you keep them on their same food source you should be just fine. I made the mistake of not having metro on hand when I got my 16 Kazumbas and, of course, they bloated up. I managed to save 12. I won’t make that mistake again.

Tropheus are actually very easy to take care of once you get them past the initial arrival phase. Keep them on their spirulina based diet and all should be right with the world.

Tropheus Duboisi

There are a couple of arenas of thinking regarding Tropheus and aggression.

Some people like to have a ratio of 1 male to every 3 to 5 females. Others, myself included, have close to a 1 to 1 ratio. I suppose each has its benefits.

In my tank the only aggression comes from the males fighting each other. There are so many other them that I do not have a hyper-aggressive dominant male. All of the males show no aggression to any of my females in this setup. They are more concerned with defending their territory from other males.

Either the 1 to 4-5 ratio it is very common to end up with a hyper aggressive male. Unfortunately you will have little choice but to remove him from the tank. This leaves you with only one or two males left over. It may not be a problem but if they happen to die, you have a tank of females.

As you can guess, I prefer the 1 to 1 ratio, but the other method works well for many people.

As for crowding, you can put a lot of Tropheus into a tank as long as your filtration is good. You could put a single colony of 25-35 in a 75 gallon with no problem.