My Channoides Pair

New channoides group arriving Monday morning at 12:00am. 3 males/2 females.
 
Getting my wild caught channoides group in a few hours, I'll keep everyone updated.
 
New wild channoides group have arrived! Floating them now and will start drip acclimating in 15 minutes. I'll keep everyone updated.
 
Hey everyone,
Received my new wild caught channoides group last week, 3 males 2 females. All different sizes with the males being larger and the two females being the smallest of the group.
I have them setup in a 20 gallon with a sponge filter, a clay pot, anubias, small pieces of driftwood and some floating salvinia and giant duckweed. They've settled down quite nicely and I currently have them feeding on defrosted frozen bloodworms, microworms, baby brineshrimp, and Hikari micro pellets (at least the females and the smaller male are accepting the pellets)
This afternoon around 1:30pm, I watched my dominant male having a "flare off" with my second largest male. Both in full dress display their red colouration, intense black splotch on the end of thier gill plates, and that stunning white trim around their fins boardering the black.
I've always enjoyed watching my male channoides show off...that's until what I saw next which left me confused. Both males swam into the clay pot I had laying on it's side in the tank, what first seemed like a fight over territory slowly became something else.
The males began circling eachother, their red colouration intensified even more at this point, and they were opening and closing the tails erratically. This went on for 5 minutes an then they...EMBRACED AND STARTED WRAPPING?! They embraced and locked onto eachother 5-6 times in the past 10 minutes. These two channoides are 100% males.
This is the first time I've seen two males trying to breed with eachother, usually males would flare and chase eachother away, so I'm kinda confused. Maybe it's because my females are still small and not sexually mature, so my males are using eachother to "vent off"? Has anyone else experienced this with their channoides or other mouthbrooders?
 
I have seen this happen with some of the larger mouthbrooders before.  It is interesting behavior and I have no idea why it happens but it is not totally unusual.
 

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