"Take a walk on the wild side." my favorite cichlid importer Pete called me up the other day.

"What have you got?" I asked with my usual curiosity.

"I just got a shipment in of the Transvestite Cichlid from Africa and I knew you wouldn’t want to miss out on this one."

I knew he was pulling my leg and just needed some bizarre conversation to make his day. So I played along with him.

"How does it spawn?" I asked playfully. After all I do have a reputation for bizarreness.

"As you would expect, the female lays the eggs and then gets the male to fertilize them in her mouth after she picks them up." Who did he think he was playing with, anyway?

"Well!", I said, "I’ll just have to come on over and see for myself." This would be a perfect reason to go and visit his operation. I hadn’t been there in over a month and we both needed some of each others company.

When I arrived I found Pete in his easy chair staring at his 500 gallon show tank. I pulled up the guest easy chair, grabbed a brew and sat down to talk fish. He was in the captains chair of the starship "Cichlid." He pointed out some of planets finest fish in the view screen in front of us.

There was his silver-gold Aulonocara. It was either a freak or a new species. Either way there was only one. Down at the bottom were some very neat shell dwelling cichlids, Neolamprologus meeli POLL 1948. They were fending off some smaller synodontis cats that were trying to take possession of the shells.

The 500 gallon aquarium is like a mini lake and I am never ceased to be amazed what I find in the view screen.

After the appropriate bonding, Pete finally said to me, "So don’t you want to see them." Naturally after a couple of Pete’s Wicked Ale, I had forgotten completely the original call.

"Let’s go down to the lab, and see what’s on the slab." Pete said in his best Tim Curry imitation. So down we went to engineering as Captain Pete likes to call it.

He went right to a ten gallon bare aquarium and pointed in. I looked and saw four small little cichlids.

"These are them." he pointed. The fish darted for the darkest corner. Pete was an alien force to be dealt with and these four little fishes had no defense other then to head for the back of the tank and themselves.

I purchased the four of them. Paid Pete with four strips of gold pressed latinum and hurried home to make a temporary home for my new found Transvestite Cichlids.

My new acquisitions were very shy, staying at the bottom of the tank that was their temporary home. I added some small tetras to make the little cichlids at home.

Within days I learned that the new fish were Nanochromis transvestitus. I really thought this was a cool name. Nanochromis transvestitus was named by Steward and Roberts in 1984 stating that the males of this species are reputedly quite drab in contrast to the females. After spoiling mine in the aquarium for several months, I must dispute these claims of obvious sexual differences.

In their paper, Stewart and Roberts describe a new Nanochromis species collected from lac Mai-ndombe (formerly lac Inongo or lac Leopold II) during an ichthyological survey of the Zaire basin in 1973. Lac Mai-ndombe is a shallow lake full of detritus which drains into the river Fimi, this then drains into the river Kasai, which is a southern tributary of the Zaire, and then finally into the River Zaire itself.

The lake is notable for its black, tea-colored and highly acidic water, the pH is 4.0, and the fact that 20-30 cm below the surface owing to the darkness of the water visibility drops to zero. The bottom of the lake is largely rock covered, and where the rocks are absent, the bed consists of hard packed fine sediment, littered with very small pieces of vegetable debris. The shoreline is defined by large porous rocks and the remains of large trees, felled by the fierce storms that characterize this area.

This new Nanochromis, dubbed transvestitus for reasons outlined below, were originally collected with the poison rotenone from amongst the rocks and occurred together with characins of the monotypic genus Clupeopetersius. Gut analysis, and the subterminal mouth which serves as one diagnostic of this species, suggest that these cichlids are largely grubbers of cladocerans, midge larvae, and mites known collectively as benthic invertebrates.

The specific nomen transvestitus was chosen, perhaps whimsically, to suggest the apparent reverse sexual dichromatism of the fish. According to Stewart and Roberts, mature females are strikingly colored with vertical white bands on a dark-gray caudal fin, whereas males of this species are drab. Bolstering the separation of this new Nanochromis species from the others are the usual diagnostic meristics and morphometrics, and the aforementioned subterminal mouth, with upper jaw projecting slightly beyond the lower jaw.

Stewart and Roberts suggest that the varying degrees of sexual dichromatism in these species may reflect differential involvement of the two sexes in guarding territory, eggs, and young, and add that the most brightly colored Nanochromis species live in rocky habitats in which light penetration is severely limited, where the fish occur relatively abundantly, are perhaps colonial, and highly territorial.

Granted the females are spectacular. Their body shape is typically Nanochromine: which means they are shaped like a cigar. Their large mouths are aimed downward, which to me, gives them the appearance of having a severe overbite. The female is dusky gray. There are five black vertical bands that continue into the soft dorsal, bisecting the body from the operculum to the caudal peduncle. The operculum is metallic turquoise. The caudal is rounded and somewhat truncate and, along with the anal fin, are marked with thinner black stripes on a bright field of iridescent white

The males, while not quite as spectacular, are not the drab spouses described by Stewart and Roberts. Male aquarium specimens share the body and fin striping and are quite handsome in their own right.

They are among the smallest of the West African cichlids, with females reaching sexual maturity at slightly over one inch Total Length. Considering their aggressive behavior towards others, it is fortunate that they are so tiny.

Within a month of their purchase from Pete I observed what I considered to be courtship activity in the transvestitus tank. I quickly made a mental note to change their location to a permanent home. They resided in a ten gallon tank with large river gravel as the substrate. A nice looking tank, but the gravel was somewhat large for cichlids in the 1.5-2 inch size range to move. They continued to court and to chase the tetras. Actually, the courtship and gravel-moving was initiated by the female. She would fold her body in half and display for the male in a behavior pattern reminiscent of some Pelvicachromis females I have had. They vied with the tetras for frozen bloodworms, krill, and vegetable flakes. I knew from their behavior that they would spawn soon. I knew I had to change that tank.

A visit from Mike LoBello in search of good food, good company, and libation, prompted me to feed the transvestitus live adult brine shrimp. I wanted him to see how awesome the female was. When she didn't come out to feed on her favorite snack, I feared the worst, a battered or dying female. I picked up the inverted flowerpot, with an entrance hole knocked out that she normally occupied. A perfectly healthy but very vexed female fled her pot. Suspended from the top and on the upperside inside of the pot was the reason for both her consternation and snack avoidance, EGGS!

Earlier experience has proven to me that once you've disrupted a tank, if you don't take out the eggs immediately, there's an excellent chance that one or both parents will end up eating them. To this add the unreliability of dwarf cichlids as young parents and you have a more than likely not a no fry situation. Better safe than sorry!

I had disrupted a future family. Whenever this happens, and it occurs more frequently than I'd care to admit, my course of action is always the same. I placed a plastic tub (similar to Tupperware) in the tank. I moved the egg-laden flowerpot into it and removed both from the tank. This method ensures that the eggs are never out of water or exposed to air. Knowing that the eggs were now safe, I immediately placed an identically-sized flowerpot in the same place occupied by the one I had just stolen. The frenzied female immediately swam into it. I did a fifty percent water change and added a clear plastic divider to separate the male and female. This, once again, proved to be a prudent strategy. The female, after realizing that her eggs were gone, left her pot and viciously started to attack the divider. The poor male who was the intended victim of her wrath was cowering on the other side of the divider.

I decided to examine the eggs before placing them in a tank for artificial incubation. The eggs were amazingly large for such a small fish and were suspended by an axial thread in typical Nanochromis fashion. In a disk that numbered 50-60 eggs, several were white (unfertilized), half were beige (presumably good), and amazingly twenty-six were bright purple! Totally bizarre! The purple eggs were not segregated in one part of the disk, but were mixed in among the beige ones. I showed them to LoBello and asked if he had ever seen anything like that. He was just as perplexed as I was. We considered the possibility that this was not going to be a viable spawn.

If it were not for the late hour, I would immediately have called Robert Stagno to solicit his input. Robert, however, does not share the nocturnal habits of Mike and myself. The next day I did some research into this strange color pattern of the eggs. There was nothing I could reference to known instances of "mosaic disks of cichlid eggs." I found this amazing.

I Assumed that the eggs would be light sensitive, and I artificially incubated them with that in mind. Within 48 hours, I saw tails popping from the eggs and shortly thereafter, eyes. Eight days after spawning, the transvestitus wrigglers were all huddled underneath the slightly elevated sponge filter. Initially, they were suspended there by the adhesive gland on their heads. It appeared that although they were not yet free-swimming, some were picking on the sponge. I decided to squirt some newly-hatched brine shrimp under the filter. They were capable of eating even though they still had small yolk sacs. The fry have healthy appetites. The large mouth of the adults is even more obvious in the fry. They seem to be quite aggressive towards each other.

The fry are light-bodied and do not develop their dark markings until they are about two weeks old. Therefore the stripes are not white, but black. The dorsal fin edges are light, hinting at iridescence, and the pectoral fins are clear. The abdomen is a rich maroon extending half-way up the body. The scales on the rear one-third of the body are faintly edged in black.

In a future spawning, I hope to separate the purple eggs from the beige, for once the fry have absorbed their yolk sacs, they all look the same. I'm curious as to whether the difference in egg color is related to sexual dimorphism? In my experience spawning the Goby cichlids, Eretmodus and Tanganicodus, the fry can be sexed during the first few weeks after hatching. The light pink fry become females while their blue bodied siblings become males. This apparent sexual dichromatism disappears when they are about four weeks old. It will be interesting to experiment with Nanochromis transvestitus and discover if egg coloration in them can reveal their sex.

So the next time your cichlid connection calls with an oddball you had better get right over there. There is nothing better than a new cichlid.