Our Angle On Angels By Deborah & Rodney Ralph

 

We were lucky enough to see two of our five Angels pair off in our community tank. The pair were identified, the gold Angel was easy, as it was the only one we had and it turned out to be the female. She mated with one of our marble angels and as we had two the same size, we had to make sure we had kept the right one. The selected pair were given a two foot tank with a gravel bottom, tall plants and one tall wide leaved plant tor the eggs, all of their own. The water temperature was a constant 27 degrees celsius and of a neutral pH. They were conditioned on live and dried foods and had laid eggs a number of times before we were successful.

 

This time things would be different, as usual they chose the tall wide leaved plant and she laid the eggs and he followed closely behind fertilising them. This started at about 3pm one afternoon and went to about 7pm, before we said we had had enough. This time instead of removing the eggs, we removed the parents. We added a dose of promythesal and an airstone, which would keep the water circulating around the eggs to help stop them from going fungui. We waited and hoped that they had been well fertilised. They were. In two days 74 eggs had hatched and the rest were going white. The next few days were the hardest for us, watching them jiggling and wobbling on the leaf, but our main worry was the white eggs, whether or not they would harm the already hatched eggs.

 

Eventually, we could not stand by and do nothing, so most of the hatched Angles were siphoned off the original leaf, a few were carefully placed on a nearby clean leaf, a few on the front glass and we left a few on the old leaf just to see where the best position was. it turned out that all places were alright and five days after hatching they were free swimming. We fed them infusoria, strained egg yolk and newly hatched brine-shrimp. In the two foot tank it was very difficult to see whether or not they were getting enough tucker. The numbers seemed to be decreasing rapidly, so at eight days old we moved them by siphon to a 14 inch tank with only one loss in the move. here we fed them brine-shrimp, small daphnia, cyclops and dried foods that they eagerly ate, especially the live foods. They grew very fast and at 3 weeks old, looked like miniature replicas of their parents. Although we only had about 20 left, we had almost half gold and half marble or a mixture of both, it was really an unusual sight for us. They out grew the tank and were moved to a larger tank at a month old, still preferring small live foods. They seem to be quite sensitive to pH changes and prefer the temperature to be at 27 degrees celsius.