Courtship Behaviour

[adam1v]

I have two mellers chams and next to the tank (seperated by a non see through screen) I have a panther cham.
Earlier i was cleaning out the panther cham, he was in full sight of both my mellers.

One of the mellers paced the cage flapping its ears back and forth and the other meller didnt care in the slightest.

Would the ear flapping be common to a particular sex or is it shown off by both sex?
Im sure i have a male and female, and if that was the case, id suspect it was the female flapping her ears, but im not sure.

 

[Sepioteuthis]

Both sexes exhibit this behavior, however I think it's more common for males to respond like this to intruders.
And I would interpret it as territorial, not courtship behavior.
Did the mellers change colors at all?

 

[studiocham]

If it's OK, I'll just reply to your pm questions in the thread you linked.

Both males and females have the ability to rapidly flick, or hold erect, their lobes.

Unless you have a photo of your "female" laying eggs before you owned her, it's difficult to determine the actual gender. Has the "male" everted his hemipenes to prove his gender? Females can show very convincing mock-hemipenal bulges, so external bulges are not a reliable method in melleri.

The mirror trick does not work on all chams. If one or both go into full lateral compression, extended gular, and black, white, and yellow bright stripes and spots (no green at all), I'd think male(s) is a pretty sure thing.

However, territorial display or aggressive females can go black and yellow and laterally compress. To further confuse, not all males show white in courtship, particularly the Standard yellow-green morph, so these males and angry females look very similar.

One more confusing aspect may be (need more observations about this) the coloration of beta or deferential males in the presence of dominant males. Some have noticed subordinate males assume a female coloration and behavior. Why? Maybe to avoid a fight with the alpha male? Melleri are known to group (at the very least, seasonally) in the wild, so there may be more to this... It could be very useful to them for temporary, peaceful co-existence.

It certainly is a helpful adaptation to those males who are packaged together as "pairs" by pet dealers.

Did you say that you are keeping them in a tank?

Don't be shy to ask any questions, there are quite a few melleri keepers on this forum.

 

[adam1v]

thanks for the reply guys.
Ive tried the mirror thing and there was actually no obvious signs (to me), but I thought i would post images up for your own opinions too.

First first cham:

 

[adam1v]

You can easily tell the different temperments between each cham without physically being here

This time round, there was no flapping ears from this one.

the second cham:

 

[studiocham]

Hi Adam,

This doesn't help what you're asking, but some thoughts... The top pix, the pale one, looks the color that melleri adults take on when they are elderly, or slightly overheated, or dehydrating, or anemic due to an undetected parasite load. Just for your reference, that's the color signal, not saying it is any one of those things. It does NOT look like a receptive female. The receptives get neon leaf green to "army" green with minimized/zero yellow.

The next set of pix look like a stimulated melleri of either gender. In this case, territorial/threatened, instead of the hunting or "curious" stimulation pattern. Those are some big black bars. Nice shed starting up.