I’d like to make the point that the Parrot Hybrid Cichlid has three main classes: Flowerhorn, Blood Parrot, and Other(we don’t have enough of them to create dedicated subsets).
For Convict Parrots, I’d recommend that you keep them with other hybrids with less aggression from around the same age. For example don’t get a .5” Convict Parrot and throw them to a 9” Blood Parrot. Odds are, the Convicts are toast. However, I find that Blood Parrots and some other Variants (like a natural yellow, orange, or Purple Rose) usually don’t have as much aggression, but the Outlier rule applies still. For penny-sized Convict Parrots, buy something around a 1.5” Blood Parrot or something of the sort, that’s a good size for the least fighting, so you can develop sociable fish and therefore as aggressive specimens. Convict Parrots are actually usually not too bad with most fish until they hit around 2 cm(penny size, explanation in a second) or when they hit sexual maturity at around 6 months, which is when they hit penny size, usually. The females start getting the signature convict orange on the stomachs and drop their ovular vents, the males start growing their nuchal humps. How do I know? My penny-sized normal female and my leucistic quarter-sized male decided that last month was a good time to get their game on. The female is five months old, the male is 8 months(I think). They beat the everloving CARP out of... 25? rosy red minnows they’d been chumming with, and they eventually lost the spawn to my baby flowerhorn male, who beat the carp out of the male and hospitalized the poor thing(who lost his eye prior to the fight because he got trapped under a pot.). I’m still waiting for CoVid-19 to clear up so I can get a new blood Parrot female to experiment for some alpha-version Kirins, so I’ve got that pending.
My American Mammon pair is around 7 months old(?) and an inch away from spawning size, they’re still the shyest things in my currently- overstocked display(don’t worry, I’ll fix it when this hell of a virus is history) besides my angels and a little female Yellow blood Parrot. I used to have a pair of Blood Parrots before I got the Mammons that were... 5.5” each, The male was the nicest thing in the tank, survived TWO flowerhorns(breeding attempt that got mistimed), and then the female decided that he was hers. She sparred him, he won(because he’d be toast if he were too small to overpower her) and they laid (i **** you not) an actual one thousand eggs(I compared to an existing spawn of 300 eggs from a pair of convict Parrots). The male got so vicious protecting his mate and infertile spawn that he bit into my hand(still got the scar, this was December 2019) and I had to trade them in for store credit(that’s where my Mammon ripoffs are from). There are more stories, and we all have time, I guess.
