For my husband’s birthday this year I gave him a 14 gallon aquarium. He loves angelfish so I thought that would be the perfect gift for him. I went to the pet store and bought 2 young fish. One was white and the other was a black and white marble. Angelfish are so graceful. A flat fish with long flowing fins. They do look like angels with flowing robes just moving effortlessly in the water. I had no idea what sex they were, I just wanted two because our tank would not accommodate another angelfish. I did get a Peppered Corie catfish. They are bottom feeders and clean up all the stuff that falls on the gravel. Our little tank was a happy little family until a few weeks ago. I noticed on a Sunday afternoon that the fish were swimming side ways near the filter up-take valve. There is a current there as it sucks up water and then spills out the clean water on the other side. So I was sitting across the room watching them and I told my husband how cute it looked. I thought that they were just playing around, little did I know they were doing serious business. That evening when I went to feed them, I noticed brown bumpy things on the filter intake tube. I said to my husband, “Honey look at this, something is growing on this tube.” He came over, took one look and said, “Oh, that’s eggs!” Our fish were male and female and had started a family! It was a complete surprise. I went to the Internet and read up on angelfish spawning. The really bad thing was that they were on the intake tube of the filter, right where a strong current sucks everything up to get filtered out. So our little baby fish were in grave danger but there was nothing we could do. So, we just hoped for the best. The female was the marbled one named Bolo (our 3 year old named our fish) and the male was the white one named Goodie. Angelfish are semi-aggressive fish. These two seemed calm as a cucumber. They never bothered the catfish and just swam in tandem around the tank. Bolo was very proud of her brood of eggs and stayed close by, cleaning them with her mouth and chasing the catfish away if she thought he was getting anywhere close. Goodie seemed to stay clear of Bolo most of the time. Four days later the eggs became wigglers. We looked at them through the outside of the aquarium with a magnifying glass because they were not much bigger that a couple of grains of sand. It was so exciting to see them wiggle their tales and show sparks of life. Bolo kept faithfully tending them. The female will take them into her mouth and then re-stick them onto the spawning site. This is how they clean any harmful bacteria and keep them healthy. On day 6, one day before they become free swimmers things went down hill. The filament that held the wigglers began to lose some of its stickiness and when Bolo would clean them and spit them out to reattach them to the tube, they didn’t stick and got sucked up into the filter tube. This upset her greatly!! She swam down and started butting Goodie around with her head. He is smaller and docile, a little hen pecked guy. He didn’t fight back. We decided to shut the filter off for a while to give any wigglers that broke away a chance to swim to safety. After about 10 minutes this bothered Bolo and she became more agitated and started fighting with Goodie. She bit his lip and made it swell up. He got mad and swam really fast up to the intake tube and started eating the wigglers!!! It was like he was showing her a thing or two! She didn’t not like that at all. I then got a siphon and drew up the babies that were left and put them into a smaller separate tank that I had set up. Poor Bolo kept going to her empty spawning site and looking it over and them going down to Goodie and cornering him and biting his lip. He couldn’t eat for a couple of days after that. I guess she was telling him, “Oh so you want to eat my babies, I will fix you!!” I told Rich, boy there goes to show you that having children can really cause stress in some people’s marriage! None of the little fish survived. I cleaned Bolo and Goodie’s tank and leaned a long flat slate stone up against one side. That is what angelfish like to spawn on in the wild. They really like their new arrangement and have gone back to being good friends again. Goodie’s lip has healed up and he is eating just fine. So hopefully they have worked through their differences and will raise a family to adulthood. I will get a little netted deal to put the babies in when they are free swimmers. We will see what happens!
