New Digicam

[jim]

Ok I finally got one and I've been wondering about the gender of these two pachys so here goes:

here is the first up close:

and here is the second:

 

[charles]

I think the first one is a male, and the second look's like a female.

 

[jim]

I think so too but until today they looked very similar. When I went to feed today, the first ones cloaca was enlarged and you can actually see papillae in a couple of the pics. You could see them better but the server rejected my file size so I had to lower the image quality. (Still figuring out all the technical stuff)

 

[jim]

You can see them here if you look closely

 

[juston]

The cloca usually gets bigger during breading season so maybe their going to mate

 

[kyle]

Yup, the males cloaca will swell when he is ready to breed.

It's widely accepted that the cloaca grows in size to create more surface area to help spread as many pheramones into the surrounding water so the female knows he's ready to get things rockin. Behaviors such as tail waving also aid in the spread of these chemical signals through the water that the females will pick up on.

Also, in general, the males cloaca is just larger, and more elongated, where as the females just have a small, fairly uniformly round opening.

 

[dane]

i like the one with its mouth open

 

[audrey]

Do yours fight each other? How big is their tank? I had four and the big one wounded the other three and I couldn't save them even when I separated them all.

 

[jim]

These two were rescues that fought quite a bit when I first got them. I originally housed them in a 20-long until they plumped up a bit and started to get along better and just recently put them in a 10 gallon setup and they seem to be doing fine. They do each have a flowerpot which is easy to defend, so maybe that has something to do with it.