This appeared in our local newspaper on Feb. 13th.



When I had fish, as a kid, there was a myth that Angels mated for life. This was reinforced by the fact that my local fish store produced a lot of the fish they sold, on premises, and all of the Angels they sold came from a single pair they had in the back. This was when they were just starting to develop the black and other colored ones; all Angels, in the store, had the coloration of the one in the newspaper picture. (although almost all of the fish we got then were Pterophyllum scalare, or P. eimeki, or hybrids of these two, and the one in the picture looks like P. altum) Later, when I got in the business, I found that the mate for life theory was untrue. When I got breeding size fish in from Hong Kong, or someplace, if I saw some that looked like they were bulging, I would put a piece of slate in the tank with them and, many times, I would find eggs on the slate the next day. Once, I even had a double-header; one pair on each side of the slate. I guess the change of water kind of triggered them. I got so I could sex them pretty well - people would ask if I could pick a pair for them, and they would come back, in a week or two, and tell me they had spawned. I found that the easiest way to sex them was to look at them head-on. The lower half of the body, from the eyes down, generally was shaped like the figure on the left, in the diagram, for females, and males looked like the right figure.

Attached Images

sexingangelfish.jpg (17.1 KB, 5 views)

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John