Since June 2015 many things changed in the tank.

After a year all Saulosi cichlids have grown to around 8-10 cm and Saulosi females became ugly - lost their deep yellow color and became kind of greyish-yellow with light barring. They all turned to be very aggressive and within six months all but the dominating female have been killed. The beta male was also dead meanwhile. In the end I got rid of the aggressive female and left only the Saulosi alpha male for decoration.

Maingano alpha male became hyper-dominating and I had to get rid of the beta male. Several times I increased the number of fish to distract aggression. All the growing males have been killed or at least heavily terrorized by the alpha male when reaching 7-8 cm, the strongest females tried to kill the incubating ones. I had to do away the surplus males and to separate temporarily the persecuted females until recover. It took me more than a year to establish a nice looking, harmonious and only moderately aggressive group of Maingano cichlids. The alpha male stopped at around 11 cm, became massive and… fights the cleaner when I am cleaning up his cave. Luckily he is getting older and self-confident, so does not show much aggression towards the other tank mates.

After getting rid of all Saulosi except the alpha male, I introduced a group of small rusty cichlids (Iodotropheus sprengerae). I did not like them in my aquarium and finally in September 2016 I replaced them with a group of small Labidochromis Chisumulae, additionally adding four small self-bred Kakusa Yellow Labs (Labidochromis caeruleus Kakusa) from my larger fish tank. Labidochromis Chisumulae turned out to be a lovely and very beautiful species doing and looking well together with Yellow Labs and Maingano. They are full of character, very small as for Malawi cichlids and brighten the aquarium. The females are pearl-cream, the males pearl-white, with tint of very light blue. The dominant males also display very attractive black or dark blue barring. In half a year they have only grown from 3-4 cm to 5-7 cm and it looks that will not grow much more than that.