How long can 100+ convict cichlids stay in a 100 gallon?

[CichlidMan64]

My baby convicts are now around the half inch+ mark. I decide to move them out from my 40 gallon breeder and put them in my 100 gallon that had 8 larger cichlids. So far only 2 out of the 100+ baby convicts were eaten and those were very tiny underdeveloped ones, I thought my Severum, EBA, and Nicaraguan Cichlid will try to eat them, but the rest of the batch are being ignored and they are even able to swim in front of the tank with no worries.

Meanwhile in that tank, the original father fish, my polar parrot cichlid is mating with another female convict and they now have wrigglers.

So I'm wonder how long can I let the babies stay in there, my other cichlids are all in the 2.75 inch-41/2 inch range.

 

[dmyersWv]

It won't be 100 for long. Unfortunately for you the number will multiply not divide.

 

[anzo1993]

It’ll work for abit but within 6 months you’ll be flooded with fish and the tank will be filthy

 

[Toby_Hook]

Wait...
How do you know only 2 of the 100 got eaten? Did you count the original 100? How did you count the 98 in the 100 gal? How long did you wait between introducing the 100 and counting the 98?

What I would expect to happen... is each day a few will get picked off and your 100 will continuously shrink. They will pretty quickly reach a point where they are no longer a one bite snack. Then your group will stabilize until they mature. Then they will start killing each other off and breeding.

It's fun watching our fish breed. But Convicts breed very very easily, grow very very quickly and the offspring are very very resilient. The result of that becomes overwhelming quickly. Be cautious. And if you let that 100 remain a Convict grow out tank you may want to rehome the other fish from that tank sooner rather than later.

 

[CichlidMan64]

I only introduced 7 of the babies in the main tank and have only seen my fish manage to catch 2 of them and when I threw in the rest of them in the tank, and by then my cichlids already seem to except that the baby convicts are not worth the effort and gave up on hunting them.
So I decide to just wait for the babies to grow up, save the better develop ones, and euthanize the rest with baking soda.

 

[dmyersWv]

Most local fish stores will take a few at a time as donations.