Commercial Breeding of Angelfish
The Angelfish “Plague” of the 1980s
Diseases—Fungal, Bacterial, and Viral
The Allure of Angelfish
For me, it all started with angelfish. When I was a kid growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1960s, my most prized possession was my copy of “the Innes Book” (Exotic Aquarium Fishes, by William T. Innes), the bible of generations of tropical fish hobbyists. What mesmerized me and really got me hooked on keeping tropical fish was a color plate tucked into the section on plants.
The photograph (see page 101) showed a pair of adult angelfish facing each other, fins perfect and erect, surrounded by their babies, exact miniatures of the parents. That picture, and those angelfish, launched the hobby that has been such an important part of my life. Angelfish are still my first love when it comes to fish; I hope that what I have learned over many years of keeping and breeding them will be interesting and useful to you, my fellow hobbyists.
Angelfish are ideal aquarium fish because they are:
This illustration of three angelfish, printed in Beldt’s Aquarium Catalog in 1931, is a typical example of the catalog’s illustrations from the late 1920s through the mid-1940s.
• Beautiful—their tall bodies, their long flowing fins, and the way they move gracefully and regally around an aquarium make them extremely attractive fish.
• Varied—in addition to the wild silver variety, angelfish are available in many different colors and body patterns, with different degrees of flowing veiltail fins.
• Hardy—angelfish can adapt to water chemistry with wide ranges of pH and hardness, and they will put up with less than perfect tank conditions.
• Inexpensive—because these fish are produced commercially and by hobbyists in large quantities, angelfish are among the more affordable fish available at your local fish store.
• Easy to breed—very often two fish will pair off and spawn in a community tank, terrorizing all the other fish because when a pair of angelfish spawn, the territory they like is usually much larger than the tank they and their tankmates are in. Set up in their own tank, a pair will reliably produce offspring for many years.
This angelfish is truly a thing of beauty, tall and elegant, with long flowing fins and an alert presence.
When first introduced in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century (a date of 1917 is often cited), angelfish were very expensive. According to some reports, the price of a pair (just two fish, not a mated pair) was the equivalent of a working person’s salary for a week. Early attempts to breed angelfish did not meet with much success. They were first spawned in Philadelphia in the 1920s. Soon the more skilled and dedicated hobbyists were successfully breeding angelfish, but only in relatively small numbers and only the wild silver variety. By the 1980s, commercial fish farms in Florida and the Far East were producing angelfish in many different colors, patterns, and fin types. Then “the plague” hit, and angelfish were nearly unavailable for a number of years. Now that the breeding stock has been rebuilt and healthy fish are reliably available, angelfish are one of the “bread-and-butter” mainstays of local fish stores. It is my hope that you will share with me the grace and beauty of this wonderful fish and that you will include them in your tropical fish collection.
| CHAPTER 1 | Where in the World? |
Chances are you will never see a wild angelfish in your local fish store. Virtually all the angelfish available to the hobby today are produced commercially on a more or less massive scale, from the basements or garages of local hobbyists everywhere to large fish farms in Florida or the Far East. Even though it is very unlikely that you will ever encounter a wild angelfish, we can learn much about these fish in general by looking at where they came from originally and how they live in the wild.
These wild angelfish are of the variety often called the Peruvian altum. This variety is rare and is not often seen in fish stores.
ANGELFISH IN THE WILD
There are three species of angelfish—Pterophyllum altum, P. leopoldi, and P. scalare—all of which originated in the Amazon River basin in South America, primarily in Brazil but also in Peru and Colombia. The main branch of the mighty Amazon River is formed around Manaus, Brazil, a port city where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões merge in the famous “wedding of the waters” (also known as the “meeting of the waters,” or, in Portuguese, Encontro das Águas). The warmer, slower waters of the Rio Negro, which flow from the north, are almost black, full of dissolved vegetation and other organic material. The colder, faster waters of the Solimões are almost yellow, full of silt and other mineral particles washed into the river from its many tributaries in the Andes. From Manaus to a point many miles downstream,