Electric Blue Rams

**stormhawk** · 30th Mar 2012, 13:16

Make your wife smile Don, get a pair of Rams like I did. She'll probably even let you extend your tanks.

They can be kept in a partition on your rack, but any shrimplets that do the Houdini into their section will become snacks. You'd have to make their partition fry proof too.

Thanks for the link man! Great read. That new Arowana from Myanmar is just beautiful. Going by that e-magazine, it seems one of my female Rams is an Emerald.

**Navanod** · 1st Apr 2012, 11:06

May be better if I can convince the MIL to let me setup a ram tank at her house. Afterall, wifey seldom comes to see my shrimp tanks these days.

If the mesh can stop Houdini shrimplets, would it stop ram fries? I'm quite sure I can prefer any shrimps from becoming snacks now.

Yes! That new arowana is stunning. The intricate patterns had me staring at the pictures for awhile.
Emerald? The guy selectively bred it as a new variant. How did you get one? Hehe

**stormhawk** · 1st Apr 2012, 22:13

Try your best then, perhaps your MIL will agree once she sees the beauty of these fishes.

It's possible that the mesh can stop the fry, they're just as small as newborn shrimplets, but I have never tried this before.

Beats me on the Emerald part. All I know is, 2 females out of the 4 I purchased that day at C328 have more shiny scales on the body than usual. What I originally feared were that these females could have hybrids born from crossing the typical Ram and the Bolivian Ram, because in the same tank, there were a few specimens that looked like Bolivian Rams.

Anyway, I lost most of the fry due to the digging activity of the Apple Snails. One of them dug into the crater where the fry were huddling in and buried several of them, or ate them, I'm not sure. I managed to save about 8 of them. They're close to free-swimming stage now in a separate nursery tub.

**Navanod** · 2nd Apr 2012, 10:28

I think I really need a revision on what kind of Rams there are out there in the LFSs...

Electric Blue
Bolivian
German
Wild
Golden

Emerald?

**Blue Whale** · 2nd Apr 2012, 11:57

Chilids wise possibily around 3000 different types. Africa alone host to 1600 species.

Ram wise, refer to here.
http://aquariumlore.blogspot.com/200...m-cichlid.html

**stormhawk** · 2nd Apr 2012, 12:52

Don your list is correct except that Bolivian Rams are a separate species. The guy who wrote the article says he bred the "Emerald" and "Brilliant" lines by crossing the EBR with his normal Rams. So if mine shows the phenotype for the "Brilliant" line as he puts it, that means the 2 specific females that I have are from crossings between the EBR and regular Rams or GBRs.

However, while I was at C328, the tank where I caught the females from had some specimens that looked suspiciously like typical Bolivian Rams, except much more colorful. I hope that the farms here did not attempt to cross the two species.

It gets more confusing because there are apparently 2 forms sold as Bolivian. One is the true Bolivian and the other is called Mikrogeophagus sp. "Double Spot".

http://aqua-freshwater.blogspot.com/...-bolivian.html (one of the photos shows an insanely colored Bolivian male)
http://www.hippocampus-bildarchiv.co...DOUBLESPOT.jpg

The double spot differs from the Bolivian Ram in that it has a large blotch on the caudal peduncle, which is missing on the typical Bolivian Ram.

**Navanod** · 3rd Apr 2012, 09:02

Thanks for the link Blue Whale

Storm, I even found some google results about people crossing rams with angelfish, so I'm not surprised

The "double spots" looks like a cory crossed with a ram, yikes.
Is the insanely colored male the one at the "diet" section?

I think I still prefer German rams, mainly because I like the iridescence, the glittery spots on the fins and the vibrant colors! Argh...poison

**Aquanoob** · 3rd Apr 2012, 09:15

Navanod, just get the German Blue Ram and you will enjoy looking at them for hours everyday. And if given good food and water, they will spawn readily. I have about 18 3-weeks old fry right now and isolating the female and feeding high-protein food before putting back into the comm tank with the male.

**stormhawk** · 3rd Apr 2012, 12:23

Don, actually the bit regarding the crossing between Rams and Angelfish is not accurate. Some LFS in the USA was using that theory to explain the long-finned balloon Rams, especially those in gold, which are fairly common these days. I don't know how they got that idea given how different the Balloon form looks from a regular Angelfish.