How are they aggression wise ??
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The single word I would use for ours is "boisterous."
I love all my fish for somewhat different reasons for each species, but these fish IMO have the absolute most personality of the mbuna that I have. Do they fight? Absolutely... mostly the girls, actually. We just balanced our numbers out, but prior to that we had 4 males in the tank. The males seldom fought each other; I put that down to them having a very clear hierarchy among themselves, so once they set that, they just do what they do. If a more-dominant male swam up to a less-dominant male, the less-dominant male will most of the time simply get out of his way. The girls, though, don't back down and lip-lock frequently, but seldom do any real damage.
That said, our red zebra colony is the only one in which we've had overt, direct aggression related losses (we had demasoni losses initially that were likely stress-from-aggression related illness but were not outright fish-kicking-fish-butt aggression). Early on, we actually had 5M/5F, and we had two girls get very beat up. We moved both to hospital tanks; one lived but lost all of her tail (now grown back), and one died. We also had a near-miss, in which I found one of the males pinned under a rock after trying to get through a too-small space (not clear if this was aggression or stupidity but my guess is some of both); he also went to the hospital tank and eventually responded to treatment of the massive infection of the side he abraded trying to free himself.
The biggest potential stressor in our tank is that our blue male is exceedingly horny. He chases the girls pretty much endlessly. The key to that is lots of rock for hiding places and LoS breaks, having a big enough tank to begin with so there is plenty of room to run, and having the right gender ratio so that he's not endlessly chasing the same girl. It's really no different than for any other mbuna. However, female red zebras are darned hard to find unless you bring up a group and get rid of the males. If you can find them, jump on them!
Overall, like I said, these guys are probably in my top 3 of species in our tanks that I love. They aren't rare or fancy, but I see them as the mbuna's mbuna. Mostly, as I said, they're boisterous more than pure mean, and like many such creatures, occasionally they don't know their own strength. For all that, they have a ton of personality.
