We all know how difficult it is to identify the sex of these fish, so please post a picture in here and we'll try to help you (or at least give an educated guess!).
sorry McEve didnt mean to defend as much as i did lol and i know you your not attacking us and yeah i agree some of the fish do look a bit worse for ware so to speak but hopefully they will all get better soon
10x L046 Zebs for now, more coming soon ;) 6x L199 Plecos, 6x L129 Plecos, 45x Cardinals, corys & shrimps
Thanks for the concern, was rushing when i was posting and forgot to say about the particle on the females fin.
I only took a few pictures over 60 seconds as i was desperate to get them drip acclimatised and into the their tank, they never moved while taking the pictures.
I'll get a breeding trap and try to get some better pictures of them latter.
Last edited by Andrew C on Tue Nov 08, 2005 6:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Glad to hear it was only the picture. It looked a lot like the damage we've seen several times in the Help-section...
Happy the fish is good, and good luck with them! maybe they'll be eiser to sex after you guys has had them in your care for fattening up and general TLC recieved as well
The big "male" i.e. no. 3 has by the looks of it been subject to a bit of a beating. You can see that the pelvic fins are irregularly shaped, these often appear after th fish has had some pretty major fin damage.
The smaller pectorial fin could be a defect but due tothe damage on teh pelvic fins, my guess would also be recovering from a bti of a beating.
I shoudl imagine however that a good feed and the company of some lovely ladies will get him on his way.
Still think No 1. is a possible female!!
The perfect white lie..."Of course I didn't pay that much for the fish honey"
No problem Andrew, just made me jump... I'm glad to see that it does indeed have healthy and nice fins
Have you resized the pictures? The males are easy, but I can't take a guess at the others, as there too little details.... The hardest ones to sex are young females and subdominant males IMO
Even so, I do think B looks like a female.
If the originals have a much higher resolution I'd be happy to have a look at them and post them here as "closeups of interesting parts of the female"
Your Zebra shows typical male odontodal growth on both the pectoral fins, and also on the body. But the interopucular odontodal growth is typical of a female.
The fish has a slight bumb on the right side just behind the pectoral fin, which might indicate that it is a female with eggs, but the general shape of the body looks more like a male. Shape of the head looks female too. How large is it? If the fish is more than 7cm I'll lean towards female.
I don't know It's going to be very exciting to see what it turns out that it really is!
Hello McEve.
Put the unsized photos up on Imageshack and have put links to the them, as they are too big for posting.
Never used Adobe Photoshop on them, so hopefully they're not too dark, as i did brighten the previous photos a bit.
The male is around 3.5 inchs in length, while the other two that i think are females, are around 2.5 inches in length.
But i am no expert on this, just picked up bits through this forum
I think A is young male, but they are very hard to sex at that age. It might turn out to be a hairy lady. But for now, I'm guessing A as a young male, and B as a female.
But give it time, you don't know for sure until they spawn! Or rather, dominant males aren't very difficult to identify It's the other ones that is tricky