How Long Before "weeding" Should Begin ?

[skiltrip]

a month or two back, i was asking about stocking my 37g with mbuna. i got a good price on 6 yellow labs under 1", and 6 cobalt blues, under 1". right now... they are on average just over an inch. the cobalts growing a little faster than the yellow labs are.

i'm wondering how soon i should start to weed them down. my plan was to weed out obvious aggressors, and hopefully knock the number of males down. my hopes was to maybe to keep 2 out of the 6 cobalts, and as many of the yellow labs as i could (4-5).

so far the usually short chases happen, but no one is getting hurt. they get along pretty well. any aggression i see is just the cobalts with each other, occasionally they do a little mouth tugging. it's usually over after a couple seconds. and again, no one seems to be getting hurt. should i wait till they mature more before i decide who's truly an aggressor or not? i know dynamics can change very much as fish mature.

 

[Druchii]

How is your tank decorated - is there many rocks/stones/places of shelter available?

if there is then leave them all until they are 2" then decide if you can at the time which are males and which are females, unfortunatley you have 2 species which it is nigh on impossible to acturatley sex under 3" without venting them

 

[skiltrip]

I have lots of rockwork in there. basically most of the bottom is covered, and they are all piled pretty high with a TON of passageways throughout.

thanks for the advice. like i said, so far, i have no trouble. no ones getting hurt, no one is hiding. they are all equally confident. at feeding time they are one big blur of yellow and blue. quite nice actually.

as far as sexing goes, hopefully with luck the males will be the most aggressive and will end up removed due to their behavior. if not, maybe ill happen to get a mellow male or 2. who knows. either way, i'm prepared to slim things down as far as i have to. i'll give them some time to get to about 2" and i'm sure they will start showing their true selves