Breeding angelsfish

@Vis

I've got my night light on as per prof Dirk, so hopefully the parents won't eat the fry.
At what stage am I assured the parents are safe with the fry and I should stop worrying they may be eaten?

Andrew

 

Hi Andrew

I think this may differ from pair to pair. Only by seeing what yours do will you know how they behave with
their fry. The biggest problem is feeding the adults without the fry getting in the way.

Even if they do eat the fry now, they would in any case lay eggs again within 2 weeks. So you do not have to stress to much about your first batch as there are many more to come
So keep a eye on them, sleep tight and remove the parents if you actually see them actively eating the fry on purpose.

Gerhard

 

Tks Gerhard

Been keeping a log of all the happenings as I have 5 pairs spawning concurrently, and everyone is different.

Was quite impressed with the black pair as, although their ratio of fertile/infertile eggs was the lowest, they have moved all their wrigglers to a new site and seem to have eaten the infertile eggs and fungus.

Andrew

 

I wonder if there is any correlation between angel color and parenting?
My darker almost black male is definitely a better parent than his lighter
counter part. She is not bad in any way but he shows better instinct at
caring for them.

My pairs 3rd spawn also had a dismal fertility rate. This was just after I moved
them to their own 3FT. I removed that clutch of eggs and 9 days later I got
a almost 100% fertile spawn. So maybe its because they moved recently?

Those black angels are beautiful and I am looking at maybe getting a pair myself.
Are yours completely black?

Gerhard

 

Sorry for the late reply, but this is normal behaviour. Apistos also do this, and I believe one of the reason (other than to move them or gather them up) is to clean them. Its very interesting to watch, I don't know with the Angels so much, but the Apisto's would suck a few in, then kind of 'chew' for a bit, then spit them back out. Its cool to see these little balls pop out and unfold into a little fry which just carries on with whatever it was previously doing.

As Vis mentioned, the odd one or three may dissapear in the process, but thats nature I guess?

Cheers
G!

 

Tks Gareth

Back in the office this morning ( where my fishroom is ) and definatley a lot less fry this morning than there were last night but still heaps swimming around. Both parents swimming with the fry and seem to be quite protective so im only popping in to feed.

Andrew

 

How many fry would you have guessed where hatched originally? I've believe that Angels can have in excess of 200 fry at a time!! I was glad that my Apisto's where more like 30-50 a go! Less chaos!

Regards
G!

 

Yeah id go with about 200, and cant believe the amount as these parents are small compared to the size I believe angels can grow.

 

Yer, its quite amazing! I got a 'pair' of Apistogramma SP. 'Steel Blues' a while back, and the female was tiny! She was at best 3-4cm, and I thought how on earth can this be a pair?

2 Days later, she had laid around 30 eggs. I was amazed! The pile of eggs was bigger than she was! It left me thinking 'how on earth did she manage to hide all those?'

There is nothing quite like Breeding Cichlids!! Its an impressive spectacle!!

Regards
G!

 

Hi Guys,

I wanted to make a few comments on this thread before heading off to a heavy lecture yet again. In general I would agree with most of the comments made here but I want to add a few things:

Andrew, you have moved these fishes and their tanks less than two weeks ago and as a result these tanks are not stable yet, their biological filtration may be a little upset and not run in properly again. Under such circumstances you can expect greater bacterial decay of eggs firstly and secondly the fishes have not settled in properly and the males may as a result not be fertilizing properly, so this may explain why you have quite a few fungused eggs.

Secondly, Somerset West water is absolutely perfect for angels, I have bred literally thousands of them over the past 25 years. The pH should not be an issue and it usually drops too low because of the low carbonate hardness, but this is not a problem for angels.

In principle, I believe that angels should be able to raise their young as pairs and they normally do so. They are excellent pairs in general and I would not consider removing the one or the other parent. My wild type angels are excellent parents and if you put your hand in the tank if they have eggs or fry they will launch an all out attack on you and bite you flat out. However, this is where man has upset nature again. Some domestic angels that have been selected for fancy colours have poor parenting properties and it is in these fishes that the parents will fight with each other and where you should consider removing one of the fishes if the other parent is attacking it. However as soon as you do this the fry that you produce will also have these poor parenting properties, so you will be contributing to the problem. However, I actually do not believe that this cannot be fixed, I try only to use pairs that work together well.

Then on the black angel genetics, I can inform you that Marco is quite correct that the black pigment formation requires the fish to put a tremendous amount of its reserves into the black pigment formation, both in terms of energy from the food and in terms of protein, so they need to be fed more carefully or else they will not grow out properly, and they will be poor parents. Inherently because of this problem apparently, black angels are also a lot more aggressive than other angels so this is an additional problem.

The genetics of black angels is a quite simple dominant Mendelian gene as we call it. Angels with a normal gene and a black gene will therefore be black, but this is not then a completely jet black fish. Such a halfway fish, we call it a heterozygote, will be a more smoky than black fish when adult and you will be able to see the stripes that normal angels have under the black colouration. Because these fishes actually produce less black pigment, they will grow better and be stronger fry. If you an angel that has two black genes, then it will be jet black as an adult, but it will grow more slowly as described above. Often the black angels that are sold consist of fully black and heterozygous black youngsters and then you have both when they grow bigger (these are the black fry and the grey fry, you describe Vis). Black angels are also inbred and as a result they are more difficult to breed and raise the fry. If you have a pair consisting of two heterozygous fishes, in other words smokies, they will have 25% of their offspring being a combination of two normal genes (one from each parent), 50% smokies, and 25% full black. However, because the black offspring are not so healthy, such spawns often result in 50% of the offspring being normal angels. These normal angels are also mostly goldens because they do not have normal pigment as wild types do.

There are also strains of black angels that have different genetics and are actually marble angels that are completely black. They have a different inheritance. I currently have both types of blacks (normal and Marble type) and I am trying to get them to mate with my wild types to get some decent genes back into them, but they just keep on breeding to their black mates for reasons which I do not quite understand. However, I have a good wild type male in a tank with some black females and I want to see if I can get them to spawn.

A lot has been written on angelfish genetics if you go and have a look at the international Finarama website, where I am the scientific advisor.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Excellet read Prof, thanks for taking the time to type it out......

 

Dirk

Thanks for the informative read.

An update on my spawning pairs. Only 2 of the five pairs have not eaten all their fry/eggs. And in 2 pairs I lost the females. I am assuming they were killed by the male??

I am happy though to use the parenting behaviour of the adults as a selective criteria and only breed with fish that 'look after' their offspring and thus giving future keepers of these offspring a better chance of succesfully breeding their own angelfish.

So do I return these 2 males to my batch of about 30 similar sized angels and see if they are able to pair off, or does one "cull" these males?

Andrew

 

Hi Andrew,

Unless you specifically saw that the males were attacking and damaging the females you cannot assume that the males killed the females. Also, if these fishes are not good balanced pairs then you can have aggression between the males and the females so I do not know if these were fishes that were paired off before. What I would suggest is that you return the males to the group and they may pair off with other females and then they may look after the young with the new female, but I would not cull them, that is a bit unfair.

I also want to reiterate that I think a lot of your egg and fry losses are because of your move and new setup. You can see how I would suggest this is done when you come to visit this evening.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Thanks Dirk

Look forward to seeing your set up this evening.

Andrew