Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
Another newcomer to the forum
Good to see another cichlid keeper in the making.
Lots of good advice given so far.
I keep a mixture of African cichlids myself. I have haps/mbuna/peacocks & tropheus.
Couple of vids here:
www.irishfishkeepers.com/cms/component/o...w/id,33856/catid,61/
They are hugely entertaining fish, hardy, colourful & easy to breed.
They are messy though & you do need to overfilter though so be prepared to fork out for a couple of external filters for your tank as well as committing to large weekly water changes.
In addition to the types mentioned above there are also Haps (Haplochromis).
These are generally bigger & live over sand unlike mbuna.
In general African cichlids are aggressive - even the most placid ones by African cichlid standards are aggressive.
So bearing this in mind you need to be very careful about the species you buy & the order in which you introduce them as some are prone to becoming hyperdominant & will kill everything else in the tank.
Buying 'assorted africans' without knowing what they are is a big mistake as some of the nicer looking ones are the nasty ones.
Anyhow, don't be afraid to ask questions & if you are Dublin based you're more than welcome to drop around & have a look at my setup to see what you're getting yourself in for
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