What was the hardest cichlid that you have successfully bred.. Mine where a pair of red devils. the male always wanted to kill the female I had to seperate them everytime after they bred. ( they successfully bred about 12 times. in the 2 years that I had them. )
lol for them it was a pain i mean they laid the eggs and where fertilized and then the babies where hatched and even grew to about 1 (the male always protected them) inch which where store credit at my LFS but I have bred G. terrors, Jags, jacks, convicts, Angels, and even had a firemouth and convict breed twice but none where a pain like the devils where.
p.s. dont worry the hybrids never made it to the petstore cuz they was feeders (I only kept one just to see what it looked like)
it had the body of a firemouth but the colors of a convict... only cool thing about it was instead of having a red "throat" like most of the firemouths it had a navy blue one.. kinda cool i think.
well usually what really works great is giving them a big nutrious meal for about 1-2 weeks straight. and having the water at about 84 f. that has worked for most cichlids. a nice nutrious meal would be live bloodworms or even better small live earth worms, bugs, insects. and dont worry about pesticides and insecticides cuz if there was some the bugs would already be dead.
after all most cichlids are really insectivores and your red flag or redbreast acara (whatever you prefer) are perfect canidates for small insects and worms. they may not bring out color but they defenitly a lot healthier then normal pellots! just try it and see how it works.
I'll give that a try after I can tell if a pair has formed. These buggers are hard to sex, and so far after 5 months I can only tell that I'm pretty sure I have at least one male and one female and two others...and no one seems to really like each other.
