Vieja tuyrensis: My Cichlid Is Uglier than Your Cichlid!

By Darrell R. Ullisch

     Sometime back, Charlie Grimes wrote an article about spawning Cichlasoma urophthalmus, a large, mean, and sometimes not attractive Central American Cichlid. Well, I got him beat. This is another one of those species that is officially placed in Vieja, but doesn’t really belong there according to Juan Miguel Artigas. So why did someone who normally keeps sweet little killifish and tetras try to breed a big, dumb, ugly Cichlid? I don’t know, but here’s the story.

     It goes all the way back to summer or spring of 2004. I attended a meeting of the Grand Valley Aquarium Club, because the speaker scheduled was Dan Woodland. Dan had been there before, and also visits our club occasionally, and I was looking to get some big fish for the 125 gallon tank in my living room. I didn’t mind raising them up for a while, I can be patient. Little did I suspect that this fish would try that patience, to its limits and beyond. Anyway, a bag of young of then Vieja tuyrensis was one of Dan’s contributions to the auction, and I bid on them because they were not a common species in the hobby. I took these 1 1/2 inch young home and put them into a 10 gallon tank in the fish room temporarily.

     A little research would have gone a long way, but I didn’t do any of that until well after I had gotten the fish. Turns out the species comes from the Rio Tuira (also spelled Tuyra), in the extreme southeastern end of Panama - Central America, but just barely. The region is not often collected, and is isolated from other parts of Central and South America, so it has several unique species, including this one. Males of V. tuyrensis can reach about 10 inches, females slightly smaller. I believe Dan had collected his breeders himself, so the fry I purchased were F1 from wild.

     A few months later I moved them upstairs, shortly after returning from the OCA show and auction. I had picked up some other potentially large Cichlids there, a fish then known as Chuco Species “Rio Guarumo”, now called Tomocichla asfraci. It is still quite rare in the hobby, and one of the most colorful fish you have ever seen. They were the same size as the tuyrensis, which I had been told were not overly aggressive. Within a week I could not find any of the asfraci, though I didn’t know for certain who did them in. Maybe it was the Panaque maccus Plecos hiding in the wood. Yah, right.

     The 125 had one outstanding feature that I was particularly proud of: a stand of Jungle Val planted at one end of the tank that had grown across more than half the length at the surface. It was a healthy stand, even putting out runners. I knew the young fish could not uproot them, so I left them in the tank. About two months later, I noticed that the ends of the streamers were getting ragged - and shorter. There were several fish in that tank, but none that I thought were vegetarian. Then one day I saw the whole group of tuyrense ripping at the ends of some now very short Jungle Val. Turns out that they are extremely vegetarian, as eating those Vals wasn’t easy for the now 3 inch fish. Heck, they grew pretty fast on those greens, as well as the regular flake foods and occasional frozen brine shrimp.

     Okay, most of the fish in the tank were removed by this time, but I added two Red Terrors. These were true festae, and got along nicely with the big, grey speckled and striped fish. However, after about a year I realized that these were both females, so they were sold. Up to this time I had been trying to sex the tuyrense, and had concluded that they were all males. After the festae were removed, something happened. The largest fish started chasing around 4 of the other 5, but was somewhat protective of the smallest. It looked like a pair had formed, so I caught  3 out of 4 extras - the last one was extremely evasive for a 4.5 inch fish. I didn’t want to tear the tank up too much, I feared it would upset the pair.

     Well, as fate would have it, they did spawn. But if you think this is the end of the story, guess again. The small spawn was laid on the inside of a large flowerpot that only the female could enter. I managed to get a couple of pictures from underneath the tank. Three days later they disappeared, and the female was out swimming around. Well, first spawn, probably infertile. Just wait for the next one. Yah, right.

     The male decided he didn’t like her anymore, and started to soundly thrash the little female. Fortunately, the fish that I couldn’t catch before also caught a lot of it from the male, and while both fish were pretty ragged, they were never seriously damaged because they could get behind the big pieces of red slate and he couldn’t. After about two months of waiting for another spawn, I got fed up and moved the male to a long 30 gallon tank in the fishroom by himself. Hey, if he couldn’t behave, it was solitary confinement. I also advertised that I was willing to give the whole group to anyone who wanted them. Apparently everyone else was smarter than me, or my griping had given them too much warning.

     The two remaining fish, which I figured to be both female, were moved down to a 90 gallon tank. The other three extras, which had been biding their time in a six foot diameter wading pool, were also moved over to that tank. After only a few days, it looked like two of the larger fish had paired up. I looked for what could be sexual differences, but none of the characteristics I had noted before in the big male were showing. In fact, both fish had large, round bellies. Two females, perhaps? I decided that after three months in isolation, the male was needed in that 90. Bear in mind, at this point I didn’t care if he killed all of the others, just so long as he died with them from the pollution.

     Well, he chased the largest of the others to the far side of the tank, and started making goo goo eyes at the slightly smaller fish of the supposed pair. Having been here before, I didn’t get too excited, though this fish was closer to his size than the tiny female before. Surprisingly, the male drew an invisible line at the middle of the tank, and so long as the other 4 stayed on their side, things were relatively peaceful.

     Within two weeks I observed the female of the new pairing was hiding behind one of the large slates moved from upstairs. A flashlight verified that there were indeed eggs, so I crawled under another tank to take pictures. When they hatched three days later, the pair had dug out from underneath a rock, so deeply that I couldn’t even see under it. The other fish were removed, at least, three of four were. One ( same one?) kept diving too close to the family area, so I had to be very patient, and finally caught it about a week later, around the time that the fry started swimming.

     Well, the pair turned out to be some of the best parent cichlids I have seen in almost 40 years of fish keeping. At one month of age, they were still protecting the young. However, the kids had started feeding off the parents slime, and the male in particular was taking the heaviest damage (Karma, or poetic justice, I’ll let you decide). So the breeder pair was taken out and carried over to a friend’s house (I hope we can remain friends after this!). All the fry were moved to a 40 gallon breeder tank to grow out.

     Hey, if you’re crazy enough to spend three years, and feed all your aquatic weeds to some big, grey, speckled fish with black bars, you couldn’t find a better fish.

from the July/Aug. 2007 SWAM, publication of the SouthWestern Michigan Aquarium Society