Basics of flower horn fish keeping

The Flowerhorn fish is also known with the Chinese common name Hua Luo Han; this fish does not exist in nature but it is a hybrid result of various cross-breeding of South America cichlids, in fact it can be listed under the Cichlasoma genus, even if the starting breeders are unknown, the most of people think about Cichlasoma trimaculatus, C. Festae, Red Parrot cichlid, Jingang and other fish.

Flower Horn is a unique fish with a very interesting behavior, temper and completely unusual appearance.

Those who decided to keep Flower horn in a tank have never regretted it.

Cichlid fishes as a rule aren’t very critical when choosing their couple match, therefore they can make couples not only with their kind, but also with completely different cichlid fish types.

Such a peculiarity gave breeders a possibility to obtain a number of amazing hybrids with different kinds of fishes. Not all the hybrids are successful, some of them doesn’t have good coloring, some become sterile after such breeding.

But there are always some exceptions.

One of the famous and popular tank fishes – parrot fish, is exactly the result of artificial crossing. As well as a flowerhorn cichlid, it’s a son of genetics and Malaysian aquarists persistence.

It was Malaysia where thorough line breeding and different cichlid types breeding (which ones no one yet knows for sure) was performed to get a healthy and fruitful breed.

Flowerhorn cichlid fish is a hybrid, however it doesn’t tend to get sick, it’s good looking and fruitful.

Appearance:

Flower Horn max size may be up to 30 cm (12 in). There are some species of 40 cm body length. Flower fish growth rate is rather impressing, during their first year of life they grow up to 2 cm in a month.

Flowerhorn is a typical large American cichlid with big bulky body, fan-shaped unpaired fins and a bright colored hump on its forehead. It’s interesting that not only flowerhorn cichlid male has such a hump, but the female, too – but it’s rather small and unpronounced.

This is the only common thing they have.

Very seldom one can see two identical species of flowerhorn fish. Mainly all horn fish species even relatives from one breed vary greatly in coloring and body shape. During their life the coloring changes and it gets its full beauty when the fish becomes reproductive.

Attentive studies of lots of horn fish photos showed that morphologically “flower horns” can be divided into several groups, each of them will have its dominating features common with their parental type.

Therefore, it’s quite possible that the fish breeding process was performed simultaneously in several breeding lines. The following typical fish types were created then: “Regular Fowerhorns”, “Pearl Scale Flowerhorns or “Zhen Zhu”, “Golden Flowerhorns”, “Flowerhorns That Fade, “Kamfa strains”. Besides, there’s fish classification (A, AA, B, BB, C), where the class depends on a shape and intensity of bands and spots on the fish body sides.

Flowerhorn cichlid lifespan is about 8-10 years.

Qualitative Flower horn cichlid has to meet the standards of its body shape:
— the fish body: has to be oval shaped, big and bulky with rounded abdomen. Some new morphs have more rounded shape.
— occipital hump: it should be big and symmetrical to the body proportions.
— black spots: it’s important for them to be thick and easily visualized since this is the main Flower horn feature. Some new fish morphs don’t pay that much attention to it.
— coloring: the most common fishes Flower horn are usually red. In ant case – any color should be bright and well defined.
— fins: fluke and other fins has to be as large as possible.

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