Yellow-tail acei

Care at a glance

Overview

Acei are active, mostly peaceful for an mbuna, and best kept in a group rather than alone. They spend most of their time in the middle of the tank, cruising around. Feed a mostly vegetable diet of spirulina, algae-based pellets, and greens, since too much protein causes digestive trouble. They can still get territorial, so house them with other even-tempered Malawi cichlids and keep numbers up to spread aggression.

In the wild

This is a Lake Malawi mbuna from the shallow rocky shoreline, often hanging around sunken logs and branches over a sand and rock bottom. To match that at home, give it hard, alkaline water in the high 7s to mid 8s pH and a temperature in the mid to high 20s C. A 160 liter tank or larger with rock piles and open swimming space suits it well.

Good to know

It belongs to the cichlid family (Cichlidae) and reaches about 12 cm as an adult. Unusually for an mbuna, it grazes biofilm and algae off wood as well as rock. It is a mouthbrooder, with the female holding the eggs and fry in her mouth. Captive breeding is tricky, but it is not considered threatened in the wild.

Did you know

The most common form has a blue-purple body with a bright yellow tail, but there are also white-tail and yellow-tail variants traded under the same name depending on the collection point along the lake.

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