If you want to keep a cichlid that behaves like a cichlid, guarding a cave, herding a cloud of fry across the tank, flaring at anything that comes near, without needing a huge tank or fancy water, the kribensis is the classic answer and it still holds up. Pelvicachromis pulcher is a West African dwarf cichlid from the rivers and drainage ditches of southern Nigeria and Cameroon, farmed in vast numbers for the hobby, and forgiving of almost everything a beginner will throw at it. The female’s cherry-red belly, which brightens rather than fades when she is ready to spawn, is one of the best colours available in an easy fish.
Why kribs suit hard water
Wild kribs come from a range of waters, including brackish-influenced sections of the Ethiope River, so the species never needed soft acid water the way many dwarf cichlids from South America do. More to the point, virtually every krib in the shops is many generations tank-bred in ordinary tap water. Mine live and breed in very hard water, 22 to 23 dGH with a pH around 7.5, and show no sign of caring. That puts them on the short list of genuinely colourful cichlids for hard-water keepers, alongside the Tanganyikan shell dwellers I have written about in keeping fish in hard water and shell dwellers.
One honest footnote: in very hard, alkaline water, krib broods skew heavily male. Sex in this species is influenced by pH during egg development, with low pH producing mostly females and high pH mostly males. For a display pair this is irrelevant. If you ever want balanced broods to pass on, that is the one job where softer, more neutral water earns its keep.
The rest of the care sheet is short. A pair needs a tank of 80 litres or more with a decent footprint, 24 to 26 °C, and ordinary clean-water maintenance. They are greedy, unfussy eaters: a quality small pellet or flake as the staple, frozen bloodworm, daphnia and brine shrimp a few times a week, and the odd bit of blanched vegetable. They also dig, mildly by cichlid standards, so use a sand or fine gravel substrate and anchor plants well or choose types attached to wood.
Buying and sexing a pair
Kribs are easy to sex once you know the tells, which makes them unusual among beginner fish. Females are smaller and rounder with a shorter, rounder tail, a purple-red belly patch, and gold-edged dorsal fins. Males run larger, up to about 10 cm against her 7 to 8, with longer, pointed dorsal and tail fins and a more washed-out belly. If you can, buy a young pair that has chosen each other from a group in the shop tank, or buy six juveniles, let a pair form, and rehome the rest, because a pair that self-selected is far more stable than two strangers introduced as adults. A mismatched forced pair often ends with the male battering the female, so give her escape cover either way.
Pairs, once formed, are genuinely monogamous by aquarium standards and will spawn repeatedly with the same partner for years.
Cave spawning, start to finish
Breeding kribs is close to inevitable if you keep a pair well, and it is the whole show. Provide caves: an upturned flowerpot with a notch in the rim, a coconut shell, or a ceramic cave, ideally two or three options in different corners. The female does the courting, curling her body into a U and vibrating her brilliant red belly at the male. The pair then disappears into the chosen cave, where she lays 50 to 150 eggs on the ceiling and tends them while the male patrols outside.
Eggs hatch in about three days at 26 °C, and roughly a week after spawning the parents lead a cloud of free-swimming fry out into the tank. This is the sight kribs are kept for: both parents herding the shoal around the tank, the female’s fins semaphoring signals, stragglers taken into a parent’s mouth and spat back into the group. The fry take crushed flake, powdered fry food and freshly hatched brine shrimp, and they grow quickly. Parental care runs two to four weeks before the adults lose interest, and they are usually ready to spawn again within a month, so like breeding livebearers, the real problem is not producing young but having a plan for them. Talk to your local shop before the first brood is saleable at around 2 to 3 cm, not after the third brood.
New pairs frequently eat their first spawn or two. This is normal, not a broken pair; they get better with practice, and interfering rarely helps.
Tankmates, and the breeding caveat
Outside breeding, kribs are peaceful for cichlids. They claim the bottom third of the tank near their cave and largely ignore fish that stay out of it. Good companions in a 100-litre-plus tank are sturdy midwater and surface schoolers: Congo tetras in bigger tanks, medium rasboras, cherry barbs, or hardy livebearers like platies and swordtails, which enjoy the same hard water. A single krib pair with a livebearer colony above them is about as easy as a breeding community gets, though be aware the kribs will treat livebearer fry as food.
The caveat is what happens when they spawn, which, again, they will. A pair with fry defends a territory perhaps 30 to 40 cm across with total commitment, and in a small tank that territory is the whole tank. Bottom dwellers suffer most: corydoras and small plecos in a 60 or 80 litre tank with breeding kribs get harried relentlessly, because they cannot read the boundary and keep blundering across it. In a larger tank with sightline breaks of wood and plants, everyone works it out. Do not keep two male kribs, or two pairs, in anything under about 200 litres. Run the numbers on total stock before adding a pair; the stocking calculator helps, but give a breeding pair a generous margin beyond what raw litres suggest.
The realistic pitch
The kribensis earns its place on merit: hardy in the water most of us actually have, sexable at a glance, spectacular in colour for the price of a common fish, and the cheapest ticket available to watching real cichlid parental care in a living room. Start with a cycled, mature tank, and if you are still setting up, do it properly via fishless cycling first, because breeding fish and their fry are exactly the animals you do not want riding out an ammonia spike. Add a self-chosen pair, two caves and some tough plants, and the fish will handle the interesting parts themselves.