Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em!
#1
As you might remember I posted this pic a few months back, bout mid march, nice baby uaru. I bought two. I went back to get more,a few weeks later but someone else bought them.
...and so mine grew up, happily enough, dutifully destroyed just about every plant I own and had a whale of a time doing it. Fairs fair I knew they were herbivorous and the plants were sacrificial. I plied them with veg of various sorts, livefoods, they both grew a real love of hikari algae wafers. They now look like this , about the size of a young adult discus, or a yearling severum, basically about 6 inch.
Then im back at the same shop and see some more Uaru, three for ?15 , bargain thinks I, grabs wallet and the nearest lass who sells the fish. I said, "whos breeding these then" cos mine were pretty good specimens, though these looked a little rougher. She replies "oh these are the same batch as yours, the guy who bought them after you got some brought them back".
"WTF?" says I.
This is why.
They are a
third the size of mine!
Not the shops fault this time, in fact aquajardin have been pretty damn good as a fish supplier, but how the hell did the guy that bought them before keep them for christ sake? Mine regulate their own dietary intake, they eat what they need and then stop, these little guys just eat all the time! They are so paranoid about not getting fed they eat like a wolfpack!
In one breath we have to tell people not to overfeed goldfish, in the other am I really gonna have to start telling people to actually feed cichlids too? Crap skinny blue acaras, wilting oscars, tiny uaru, bony geophagus, not to mention the oxydoras....I see them in shops all over.
How cheap do you have to be to not feed the damn fish? I have Uaru who are brethren, the same batch of damn fry, who cannot be put in the same aquaria for 2 months because the ones I bought first are so big theyd beat the crap out of them, and the new ones are so underdeveloped they cant win a fight with a keyhole cichlid!
The word for that is FUBAR.