Panduro questions still-

[IDMiamiBob@aol.com]

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that the A. panduros I picked up at the 
convention appeared to be all males.  After looking at the pelvic fins, i 
decided that I had 3 females and one male.  The male is the smallest, of the 
bunch, and I doubt that he is old enough yet to spawn.  I separated the four 
fish and put the smallest female in with the single male, and the other two 
females in a separate tank, using ten gallon tanks.  I left the water at 7.4 
pH as it comes out of the tap, as in the past I have seen increasing 
aggression against conspecifics as pH approached the pH 5.0 level that 
induced spawning. I wanted to get the male up to a little bigger size before 
anything got going.  Yesterday I came home to find the dithers dead in the 
tank with the pair.  Upon closer examination, the female was under a pot 
shard, picking off the last of the eggs, that were all turning milky due to 
infertility.  The male was hiding in the back under the hydrosponge.  I 
thought to move the male to safety in the other tank, but found that one 
female in the other tank was spawning solo in there.  The other female was in 
stress, and even after relocating, did not survive the night.  So now I have 
the male in one tank, the larger female in another, and the smaller female 
all alone in a 55-gallon I was working on to be a planted community tank.
    I have two inconsistencies here:
1) the pH is way too high for this fish to be interested in spawning.
2)  both of these females are very yellow, yet still neither of them has the 
mid-body splotch.  The black on the cheeks, rather than a large streak 
running from eye to eye under the chin, is more like the angled stripe on a 
female aggasizii.
    While I can accept the pH alone as just a unique anomaly, the fact that 
both of them spawned solo in less than ideal conditions, combined with the 
coloration, leads me to ponder.
    The male also has failed to develop the caudal peduncle "triangle".  Is 
it possible that these guys are acutally something else, an Apistogramma 
sp.aff panduro, from a whitewater location?

Perhaps worthy of noting in this discussion- The heat wave tends to get my 
tanks up to around 82 or 83 F for a day or two, and this was the case when 
they spawned.

Bob Dixon


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