Help sexing Apistogramma Ortegai

[Mezzy]

Any help in trying to sex these fish.I bought them as a trio of Ortegai online.
They were shipped in 1 bag and came in fry size tiny maybe 2 cm max.
As soon as I put the bag in the tank I noticed 2 of the fry weren't doing well so after an hour of drip acclimating them I put them in their tank.
As soon as I released them from the bag the 2 fry were laying in the ground lifeless.I feared the worst but thought there wasn't much I could do but wait til the next morning to see if they pulled through
The next morning as I looked in I saw that both fry were still on their side I closely moved the net to 1 of the fry no movement I realized the poor guy hadn't made it.As I went to net the other fish out I saw it moved slightly so I thought I would wait another day.The next few days went by and as I would move my net close to it it would wiggle away.At this stage I decided to try and get a close up of the fish when I noticed that it's tail had been completely bitten off and was the reason it couldn't swim properly.So I started treating the tank.At this point I started to think that maybe they had attacked each other in the bag, has anyone experienced this before? It would explain why both fish seemed to be unable to swim when I first introduced them.
Anyway after this within a few weeks the tail had completely grown back from the stump it was.At this time the fry were maybe 3 cm still very small I started noticing aggression between the 2 fish mainly coming from the fish that had been previously tailless.I decided to separate them shortly afterwards to some tanks next to each other.
I'm hopeless when it comes to sexing dwarf Cichlids but I thought these were both the same sex just through the aggression and flaring through the glass.
They are about 6 months old now so I thought they might be old enough to Id.
One last thing I've noticed in the last month they have got a lot more blue coming through the top and bottom fins.Apart from that they are mainly yellow so I thought they were both females now I'm not so sure.

Any help is appreciated

 

[MacZ]

Sorry to say, but to me they all look like females. I see no signs of one possibly being a male.

 

[Mezzy]

Thx for your help MacZ, I originally was leaning towards females but the blue they were showing on their cheeks andv fins were throwing me.Might be hard for me to find a male but hopefully I can.

 

[MacZ]

A. ortegai females have astonishingly much blue in their colouration.

 

[Tom C]

Might be hard for me to find a male but hopefully I can.

Based on the shape of the double caudal spot, your fish are not A. ortegai. They are one of the A. cf. ortegai (Pebas) forms. So that is what you should look for.

 

[Mezzy]

Hi Tom thx for your reply .
From memory they were sold to me as pebas haplotype and they came from Norway from a collection trip several yrs prior.Ill try and see if the seller will get anymore fish from that source but I'm not holding my breath

 

[Tom C]

Interesting! As far as I know, I'm the only Norwegian who has collected A. cf. ortegai (Pebas) in the wild, but that was back in 2006 and 2008 (LINK). Others may of course have collected it without my knowledge, or just brought fishes back from Peru, though...
I wish you good luck finding a male or two from the same source!