That is all I have ever heard about Parapetenia festae, the Red Terror. Easy to sex but impossible to maintain a pair in the same tank before one of the sexes kills the other one. Maybe you can be successful in breeding them if a screen is kept between male and female. Unless you have a very large tank keeping any other fish in with the Red Terror is a sure failure. Hogwash! At least with the pair I have. The male is about 7 inches and the female about 5 inches. They are housed in a bare bottom 29 gallon tank with a couple of large rocks, a large Anubias barteri and a hydro-sponge filter. Along with the Red terrors are three kullie loaches that hide under the rocks and sponge filters but come out to feed.
The male is and tannish orange with several understated stripes and red fins. There is a black spot on its caudal fin and a black shoulder spot. The older the male gets the more pronounce the cranial hump is. The female is a bright pumpkin orange with dark blue-black vertical stripes. She also has the spot on her caudal fin. When spawning is immanent the colors of both sexes intensifies .
The pair are fed with cichlid pellets, brine shrimp, cocktail shrimp, and earthworms about twice a day. I do 25% water changes every week and clean the filter about every second week. The water is kept at 78 degrees with a pH of 7.2- 7.5 depending when I take the reading (before or after water change). Besides the intense colors the only other spawning indication is that the pair seem to do more jaw clenching with neither having an advantage. The male and female seems to clean a spot of the tank floor equally for the spawning of eggs. The first spawn had about 200 eggs that hatched with in 96 hrs and the fry were not free swimming in another 72 hrs.
There was a problem with this spawn. After 96 hours all the fry seem to be belly sliders. I have seen this problem with killies, some live-bearers and anabantids that are mouthbrooders but I have never seen this with cichlids. The fry slowly disappeared and after 7 days they were all gone. The second spawn was three weeks later with about 400 eggs being laid. Again the eggs hatched in 96 hrs and the fry were free swimming in 72 more hours and very hungry. Only then did the parents seem interested in the loaches. But the loaches stayed out of sight and did not come out to feed. The fry were fed Baby brine decapsulated shrimp three times and day. The adults were fed the cichlid pellets. More than one occasion I saw the female chew the pellets and expel them thru the gill plates near the swarm of fry. The female took control of the fry 95% of the time with the male guarding the territory.
Only when the female wanted to feed did the male take over guarding.
After two weeks after free swimming I removed about 100 fry leaving more than that with the parents. The removed fry were housed in a ten gallon bare bottom tank with a sponge filter. Feeding was the same for both batches of fry, but the fry left with the parents are almost a 1/3rd larger than the removed fry. The fry seem to growing fast and I will need to removed more from the parents soon. I have a feeling that the parents will do that for me soon or later when they feel a need to spawn again.
I guess the moral of the story is not to believe every thing you read and all fish are individual characters and you may get lucky and find a gem that you can breed like the Red Terror.