Hello guest! Are you an Apistogramma enthusiast? If so we invite you to join our community and see what it has to offer. Our site is specifically designed for you and it's a great place for Apisto enthusiasts to meet online. Once you join you'll be able to post messages, upload pictures of your fish and tanks and have a great time with other Apisto enthusiasts. Sign up today!
Picked up 5 of these little suckers, pretty sure right now i have 2 female and 3 males if i am right at sexing them, they were labeled dwarf banded cichlids but i am wondering which one??
Is this not A. cf. bitaeniata? And if so, I would say that the second fish is a male too.
However, there are other people here that are much better in ID/sexing than me.
Tom is correct on both counts: It is A. bitaeniata and both specimens are males. I don't know why Tom called them A. cf. bitaeniata. He may be more strict about labels than most hobbyists. Maybe he knows about the possibility that what we call 'A. bitaeniata' is not the same as Pellegrin's holotype of A. pertense bitaeniatum. Nevertheless, if you really want to find females, look for slightly smaller, stockier specimens with no markings on the caudal fin and very little metallic blue on the face. Where do you live? I have an excess of female A. bitaeniata (Tigre) available.
I'm afraid that shipping internationally is a complete can of worms. I did ship to a Canadian hobbyist once, but I shipped to his upper New York post office box. He picked them up in NY and drove them to Montreal.
cf., an abbreviation for the Latin word confer (the imperative singular form of "conferre"), literally meaning "bring together", is used to refer to other material or ideas which may provide similar or different information or arguments. It is mainly used in scholarly contexts, such as in academic (mainly humanities, physics, chemistry, and biology) or legal texts. It is translated, and can be read aloud, as "compare
If you have a friend on the Washington State side of the border it is easy to get some fish by having them sent to the friend's USA address and all you need for customs is an invoice identifying the species and the price paid.
It is getting cold enough to be risky to use Express Mail but I do it all the time between March and September depending on the prevailing weather.