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Angelfish – Where do they live in the wild (originate)?

This tropical fish comes from the Amazon River Basin in South America.

As I was doing research, I noticed that Angelfish were inhabiting the slower moving river-banks and streams.

They prefer to cluster around fallen tree branches. I noticed that two different species of Angelfish were inhabiting the same dead tree. You can see this here: https://youtu.be/DPcViFxtU94?si=tVSbtc9sSj00ufKG

One of the more interesting things I learned while verifying origins is that in the wild, Angelfish may live in water with a pH down to 3 (vinegar has a pH of 2.5 to 3). To get your aquarium pH that low you’ll need to start with reverse osmosis water.

The habitat of the Angelfish provide an excellent outline of what they need/want in an aquarium.

Angelfish Behavior

There are three reasons Angelfish are so popular: 1. They are physically attractive, and 2. they also “appear” to have friendly personalities, and they are easy to take care of. 

I’ve kept this fish in the past and I’ll share with you what I’ve learned about their behavior.

Angelfish always beg for food. When they see their human, they swim up to the front of the tank and do short, back-and-forth swimming motions. Sometimes they are begging for fish food and sometimes they have their human trained to throw food in the aquarium when they swim like that.

For the most part, Angelfish aren’t aggressive with their tank mates. As long as the other fish can’t fit in the Angelfish’s mouths, they will leave them alone.

This changes if you have a mated pair of Angels. They don’t want other fish near their eggs and will aggressively protect the area around where they’ve laid eggs, in this case the aquarium. This can lead to the other fish stressfully cowering in the corner of the tank. Stress kills fish, so this situation is undesirable.

The best thing you can do it either move one of the pair to a different tank, or move both of the pair to a different tank in hopes of having baby angelfish. I’ll go over breeding in depth, further down the page.

Setting up an aquarium for freshwater Angelfish

Here are a few items to consider for an Angelfish aquarium setup.

Cycling The Aquarium

Most hobbyists already know what this is. In a nutshell, you set up the aquarium and have it fully running but you don’t put fish in it. You will place a bit of dried fish food in the aquarium every day, as if you were feeding fish. What you are actually doing is feeding the beneficial bacteria that break down toxic waste (in this case “uneaten food”), into the less harmful product called nitrates.

Leave the aquarium with no fish for about two weeks. By that time, the bacteria colony will be large enough to do the job that they are there for.

Add A Water Conditioner

In writing this, I am going to assume that like most water companies, yours adds chlorine or chloramine to your tap water. They do this to kill bacteria that might harm people. Unfortunately, these chemicals kill tropical fish.

We need to neutralize the chemicals to make the aquarium water safe for fish. To do this, you will want to use a water conditioner.

There are many types of aquarium water conditioners available. I’ve used API Stress Coat+ for 30 years and can highly recommend it.

Lighting

Angelfish will not be picky when it comes to lighting. The only time lighting will probably matter is when a mated pair is spawning or caring for eggs, wigglers, or fry. If that’s the case, then lowering the light intensity is suggested. Subdued lighting will mimic what the pair would experience in their natural habitat and hopefully keep them from eating their eggs or offspring. (Looking for aquarium lights? Try this Amazon page.)

Filtration

The filtration I’ve used for years is a large canister filter with a high quality, inline UV sterilizer attached to the return hose of the canister filter. This set up filters the water and also controls harmful bacteria, pathogens, parasites, and algae.

Your filtration system will not be a cure all setup. You are also going to need to do 75 to 90% weekly, or more often, water changes. Combining the two will probably be as good as it will get for a closed aquarium.

I have used Fluval Canister filters for years. I own two currently. 

Decorating Your Angelfish Aquarium

There are two different ways to go when decorating your Angelfish aquarium:

1.  A natural habitat setup or

2.  What most hobbyists will do.

Natural Habitat setup

If you observe angelfish in the wild, they live in very slow-moving blackwater streams. Blackwater is low in pH and high in tannins from rotting vegetation.

Usually, there are no observable plants.

There are only three things seen, besides the fish and water.

1. Tree branches – Angelfish congregate near large branches of dead trees that have fallen into the water.

2. Leaf Litter – The bottom of the streams are covered in dead, rotting leaves.

3. Biofilm – a collection of bacteria and other micro-living organisms that cover the dead tree branches the Angelfish live near. Angelfish may nibble on biofilm as a food source.

So if you want a truly natural setup for your Angelfish aquarium, do this:

1.  Place leaves on the bottom of the tank. Let them rot.

2.  Add driftwood.

3.  Use reverse osmosis water to provide the softest, lowest pH, water that you can.

Image above: Angelfish and fry

Hobbyist setup

You can use any normal aquarium items you want to build out your aquarium. As a long time hobbyist, you might use natural colored gravel, stones, possibly driftwood and plants. Any of these items would help create an environment you would find attractive.

Personally, if I had an empty tank for Angelfish, I would create a 100% natural setting for the Angelfish I placed in my aquarium.

Water conditions and your Angelfish

Setting up the correct water conditions

1. Angelfish can adapt to your tap water as long as it’s drinkable (I.E. your water isn’t toxic).

2. As per normal for tropical fish set the water temperature at 78 degrees F. or 25 degrees C.

3. Deep Diving into water conditions: If you want to provide your angels with water similar to water in the wild, you would use reverse osmosis water (softwater) and maybe some sphagnum moss to help lower the pH.

What should you feed your angelfish?

Warning: Don’t feed your fish frozen blood worms. They are too hard to digest and will kill your fish. I recently lost two good fish to that. Don’t do it. 

Towards the bottom of this essay I have presented information from a scientific study with excellent information about feeding angelfish. (http://keralamarinelife.in/Journals/Vol5-12/9%20Jayalekshmi%20et%20al.pdf).

In the meantime here are some basics to feeding Angels that also apply to many other species of freshwater Tropical fish.

Above: Flightless fruit flies

Types of Foods:

I have found that processed fish food is mainly grains rather than actual fish meal. I’m not necessarily saying that’s bad, but once I discovered this I changed what and how I feed my fish.

When I changed foods I noticed that my Tiger Barbs began mating in the tank almost every day.

I try to feed foods that have the main ingredient of either fish meal or insects. This means looking at the ingredients on the container of processed fish foods and choosing food that meets my criteria.

I have also switched to mostly frozen foods. If a package of frozen foods says brine shrimp, then it’s brine shrimp and little else.

How often to feed your Angelfish:

A good rule of thumb is to feed your fish twice daily. This is what I do and my fish are happy and healthy.

How much food should you feed your angelfish?

Again, tried and true rule of thumb is as much as they can eat in 5 to 15 minutes. This kind of depends on what you’re feeding them. Live brine shrimp will be gone in seconds, cooked veggies may sit ignored for hours.

How do you breed successfully Angelfish? 

How to successfully breed Angelfish by lowering their stressors

Breeding of angelfish should be fairly straightforward, but it’s not. I’ve had angelfish breed in my aquariums dozens of times. In every case, the parents ate the eggs.

That’s not a good outcome.

Here is what I would suggest if I wanted to breed Angelfish and wanted the parents to be good care takers to the fry:

1. Poor food as a stressor: Feed the breeding pair good quality mostly live or live-frozen food.
2. PH as a stressor: Have the correct pH: 5 to 6 is perfect. Above that, the parents are more likely to eat their eggs or the hatching fry will die more often
3. Movement in or near their tank as a stressor: Give the pair their own tank and make it so they don’t see movement in the room by blacking out the sides (For example: painting the sides of the aquarium).
4. Light as a stressor: Lower the lighting near the tank. In nature the lighting (sunlight) is dimmed naturally by the tannins in the water.

If you do all five steps above you will have a successful Angelfish breeding with healthy fry as the outcome.

Fish TB

Not actual TB like humans might have, but a fish infection caused by a bacteria called Mycobacterium:

Symptoms:

Tissue erosion around the mouth is common.

Fish may experience a loss of appetite, sluggishness, protruding eyes, skeletal deformity, fin rot and body swelling. Not all symptoms are listed here. It seems possible (likely?) that some illnesses are misdiagnosed and are actually Fish TB.

This disease can also infect humans.

It is hard to eradicate and extremely common in aquarium fish.

Just bought a fish from your pet shop? Congratuations, your aquarium now has Fish TB floating around in it. 

Fish TB Treatment:

No known cure. Diana Walstad added UV sterilization to her tank. That seemed to fix the issue.

Diana Walstad:

https://dianawalstad.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/mb__2017c.pdf

My suggestions to control fish TB: 

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Add a quality UV light, over-filter the tank and do frequent massive water changes. This will (probably) eliminate the Fish TB you brought home. 

Dropsy

Symptoms – Rarely curable. Most fish with dropsy will die. Body swelling and protruding scales.

Treatment – Move to a quarantine tank. Set temp at 80 degrees. Use Kanamycin or tetracycline.

Reference – https://www.academia.edu/699360/A_ZFishDiseases

Fin Rot

Symptoms – Fins rotting, blood seen at the edges of the rotting fins. White cotton like growths seen.

Treatment – Move to a quarantine tank. Use Kanamycin or tetracycline.

Reference – https://www.academia.edu/699360/A_ZFishDiseases

Pop Eye Disease

Symptoms – Eyes swell up and seem to “pop” out of the eye sockets.

Treatment – Usually caused by poor water conditions. 

My advice: Change 100 percent of the tank water daily for a week, then keep the tank very clean. Then change 90% of the tank water weekly thereafter. 

Reference – https://www.academia.edu/699360/A_ZFishDiseases

Fungus

Symptoms – Cotton-like growths on the body of the fish.

Treatment – Treat all the fish in the tank. Raise temperature to 80 degrees F. Add salt if possible. Use a fish fungicide.

Reference – https://www.academia.edu/699360/A_ZFishDiseases

Gill Disease

Symptoms – Swollen gills, gills covered in mucus, fish gasping at the surface of the water.

Treatment – Change 100 percent of the tank water daily for a week. Then to prevent reinfection change 90% of the water weekly.

Or you can use the information that this gentleman suggests:

Reference:

https://www.academia.edu/699360/A_ZFishDiseases

Hole-In-Head Disease

Symptoms – Often caused by protozoa. Started by poor aquarium conditions.

Treatment – Change 100 percent or more of the tank water daily for a week. Then to prevent reinfection, change 90% of the water weekly.

Add a high quality UV sterilizer to your aquarium. 

Or you can use this advice:

Reference – https://www.academia.edu/699360/A_ZFishDiseases

Ich

Symptoms – White spots on the fish’s body. Usually caused by poor tank maintenance and/or fish stress.

Treatment – Change 100 percent or more of the tank water daily for a week. Then to prevent reinfection clean the tank weekly by changing 90% of the water. 

Add a high quality UV sterilizer to your aquarium. 

Reference – https://www.academia.edu/699360/A_ZFishDiseases

Control Food

Angelfish weight at start:
0.85 grams

Day 30 Angelfish weight:
1.05 grams

Day 60 Angelfish weight:
1.34 grams

Day 90 Angelfish weight:
1.83 grams

Angelfish total weight gain:
.98 grams

Angelfish % increase in weight:
115%

Tubifex Worms

Angelfish weight at start:
0.99 grams

Day 30 Angelfish weight:
1.27 grams

Day 60 Angelfish weight:
1.75 grams

Day 90 Angelfish weight:
2.46 grams

Angelfish total weight gain:
1.47 grams

Angelfish % increase in weight:
148%

Blood Worms

Angelfish weight at start:
0.94 grams

 Day 30 Angelfish weight:
1.01 grams

Day 60 Angelfish weight:
1.11 grams

Day 90 Angelfish weight
1.42 grams 

Angelfish total weight gain:
.48 grams

Angelfish % increase in weight:
51%

(Cultured) Red Worms

Angelfish weight at start:
0.78 grams (day 0)

Day 30 Angelfish weight:
1.06 grams

Day 60 Angelfish weight:
1.37 grams

Day 90 Angelfish weight:
1.79 grams

Angelfish total weight gain:
1.01 grams 

Angelfish % increase in weight gain: 129%