Can we have an Angelfish?

[XanAvaloni]

I think people get a little hysterical about tank size requirements for angels. They don't start off at 5 inches across after all. We have some spectacular angelfish breeders/sellers on this very list. I would look through the Marketplace for a few weeks and find somebody selling the colors or combinations you find most attractive. Then get six or eight little ones--dime to quarter size. You have a year or so to let them grow up in your tank and form pairs of their own choosing. After that you can decide which ones to keep and which to pass along to another home or a local lfs.

It's at the point where they start breeding themselves that life gets really interesting--as in you can start to drown in baby angels of your very own. This is when you start looking into getting a female betta or other agent of Darwin in action to keep the population thinned down to a tolerable level.

I have four currently residing happily in a 10-g. Got them a few months ago for free as dime-sized; they are currently around quarter to half-dollar size. No aggression issues at all and I don't find them to be any worse than other fish in the matter of waste production. (Goldfish on the other hand...shudder. They stay in the pond from now on.)

I should say they do not cause any aggression..although they are the recipients of some minor bullying of the bossy pushing and shoving nature by Benthia the Menopausal Molly.

 

[FishPish]

You can have one or two angels. Any more could end up being an ammonia problem. My one angelfish is perpetually taking a dump on top of being the biggest fish in the tank. They don't move around a whole lot and aren't necessarily a hyper active fish, but they do get territorial in some cases. If they do get territorial, better to have two so they don't turn attention to your bloodfins. My angels are constantly hanging out in the 29. I also have many ornaments and plants in the tank which the angels cannot pass, but the barbs can. Overall, there are way more aggressive fish out there than angels, but angels get pretty big and you wouldn't want to have one in anything less than a 29 imo. The angelfish I got from petsmart which is always crapping is almost fully grown in a couple of months. He was already a couple of months old when I got him.