I often here on other sites how when you add cooler water to a 80F tank it stimulates breeding conditions. i find this to be un-true. yes ive gotten some cichlids to breed after a cooler water change but only Convicts, Firemouth,and Salvani. i think that its the sound of water hitting the surface (which sounds like rain) that gets them going.

feel free to comment or give your advice and experience

Convicts just need water to breed. Cold, cool, warm, dirty, gross or otherwise. They don't care.

My mother keeps Convicts (and a few other smaller Cichlids I've conned her into taking by threatening to use them as feeder fish) She went away on vacation and had her filter fail on her. She came home to another 40 little convicts in the tank and most of her other fish dead. It gets better too, she couldn't find homes for all of them (and wigged when I wanted them for feeders) so she took them down to the flower shop near her with an indoor pond and dumped the rest into the bottom level of the pond (they had just finished it had no fish yet). This was in 2006, as of today, the flower shop still have no idea where all the fish came from, but they, have something like 300 pink cons in the pond.

Live food, clean water and a couple of places to hide seem to be the big thing to getting the South American Cichlids going. Not sure what I've been doing with the Africans, but I'm always finding fry in with those ones.

You can definately condition with warmer water, live foods and such but right after a water change gets em going for sure. My jag gets dig happy every time I change the water. Same with the HRP's they always are circling after a good water change.

Maybe the water change I did the other day triggered my Oscars into breeding mode?

just did a 40% WC with cooler water, feed them frozen blood worms 1 hour later,

stock as of now is F0 Jack Dempsey Pair, F0 Cuttri Pair, Thread Fin Acara, White Saum, Salvani