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There is a small shipment that just arrived at my local petshop, which contains about 24 zebras. I want to get about 6 of them and was thinking of getting 2 males and 4 females. These are fully grown and have been captive bred.
My question is, how do i go about choosing my males and females? what should i look for? If its too hard i was going to go for random, but healthy looking fish and hope for the best. I had a look yesterday and there were alot of 'hairy' ones, are these males?

If you had a chance like this how many males and females would you go for? I think that more females than males. I cud even male 2 trios.

Any thoughts will help

They are all captive bred? That's great considering they're threatened.

Here are some articles that should help:

http://www.plecofanatics.com/forum/inde ... ebra_pleco

http://www.zebrapleco.com/article2.php

I suggest you get two trios; (1M:2F). The reason being only the alpha male will have the breeding rights to mate with the females, and thus the other males will just either have to wait unitll they can "dethrown" the alpha male, kill him or sometimes manage to sneak away with one of his females in his harem. A pair maybe better, since the male rears the fry and thus he will only breed with one female at a time.

Good luck on breeding them!

I read somewhere that having more than 1 male (say 2) is better as this gives some competition to breed.

generally the best way to tell a boy and a female is by looking at their face shape from above view.

males will have more Square like face (i kinda call it a shovel face)

and female will have an oval face.

one this is done its about 70% sure, now check for spikes on the side of the face and the fins