Quick follow up - what have you traditionally done with lighting for frontosa displays? I’m reading online that they come from relatively deep waters in Lake Tanganyika, and so some places even recommend a low-level marine light to simulate the depth and colour striation of their natural environment.
Would that be an appropriate decision, or do you think that would result in a crazy amount of algae growth?
Not sure about algae but I dislike what marine lights do to freshwater fish. What I was doing for fronts (and it's carried over since) was to have a good freshwater light with a slightly cool spectrum bulb and sized smaller than the tank (I did a 4 ft light on a 6 ft tank), making the tank brighter in the middle and darker at the ends. In recent years I've converted to LED lights, which do a nice job bringing out blue and other colors without the weirdo glow or as much distortion as a marine light, and on most of them you can dial the lights up or down to taste and on many you can adjust which color emitters are on. Thing is there are a lot of options, some are better than others, and I'm not an expert on them.
I had one that I had to turn off the reds, because with them on fish color was off and it was growing black beard algae, something I'd never had before. So far I like
this basic model better than others I've tried, the color spectrum is reasonable and I don't care about programming my lights. But I've seen tanks with more expensive and really beautiful lighting, though I couldn't tell what they had. Basically I'm fine with a light that brings out colors the fish actually have, but I don't like distorted, overly exaggerated color. Seeing the best version of my tank and fish is one thing, but I'm turned off by photos of fish with cartoon colors they don't have in real life and white or beige sand that looks blue, lol.
There's a fairly significant difference in color between gibberosa and frontosa, gibberosa (like moba) are usually much more blue. Typical C. frontosa (often called Burundi frontosa) tend to have some blue in their fins as juveniles, then lose a lot of it to become mostly black and white adults.
