Like Duane said regarding the similarities between the 2…a lot of septems are in fact myrnae in the hobby…
other way around, a lot of the ones (at least along the eastern seaboard) are Rio limoncito septemfasciata being sold as Rio estrella myrnae. If it comes to it, you can tell the difference between septemfasciata and myrnae by:
- male myrnae are brown, sometimes a bit of gold on the gill plate and belly, whereas male septemfasciata will be red-purple with yellow heads.
- myrnae have blue speckles on the fins, septemfasciata have a blue sheen covering the soft rays.
- both sexes of myrnae will have horizontal lines on the abdomen. In males this will just look like darker lines but females it will appear as rows of the gold belly scales.
Do any of you guys have experience with these?
I believe
@Hybridfish7 has some.
I have never seen them here before but now a LFS has a tank full of them.
Specifically i am concerned how aggressive they are compared to "standard" convicts, also should they be kept in pairs or 1 male + 3 females as the shop guy said?
They would be going into a 40G with some cories and guppies so i can see a potential guppy massacre
The guy in the shop probably read my post or went to my talk, because that's what I recommend. I have kept and bred both variants. There's pretty much only 2 localities of what is currently described as "septemfasciata" circulating in the US hobby. Rio limoncito (atlantic variant) and Rio corinto (san juan variant). Rusty Wessel and a few others still have the original Rio san juan/san joses but I don't think they're distributing them. Some alleged to be from Lake arenal are being tossed around but as of yet this is not verified.
They're pretty much super convicts, more aggressive and more prolific. They get bigger than most convicts too. Rusty Wessel has a few 8" males. 40G would be fine for awhile until they get bigger but don't expect to get a colony going in a 40. Fry grow fast and have a pretty good survival rate. I would not put any dithers with them as they are allegedly the only actively piscivorous Amatitlania. Guppies will be erradicated. The 6" male I had was killing 3" sailfin mollies. They like hot water, I kept mine at 83 and they spawned every 2-3 weeks, with the male alternating females because inherently the one he spawned with didn't want to give up her few week old kids to make more. In the wild they occur alongside siquia/kanna in their respective drainages, and segregate spawning grounds by flow, with septemfasciata spawning in water with more movement, but as with most riverine-oriented cichlids in the hobby it is likely more an oxygen content thing as mine spawned perfectly fine with 2 sponge filters in place of a powerhead.
I wouldn't consider them shy, and I personally haven't gotten them to color up in my tanks like you see in the pictures, but from what I've seen (and in my experience with keeping their current sister species, myrnae) they need to be in higher population densities for you to start seeing that orange and blue coloration in some of the females. Or just cram them with a bunch of other stuff they can't eat/kill. I have a friend with one female Rio corinto being kept with 8 honduran red points in a 40 and she's pretty nicely colored up.
