Experience with all male or all female angelfish tanks?

Anyone have experience with keeping all male or all female angelfish tanks? I have identified which of mine are males and females (watched them spawn) and don't plan to breed them anyway

 

I think that it would be stressful to break up a mated pair. Do they love each other? I dont know? but they are better at monogamy than humans. When one member of a pair of pearl gourami that I had kept passed away, they other became stressed and depressed and died soon after.

 

Go all male.
Females still may lay eggs and act like a pair.
Keep enough that bully has plenty of distractions so not to whip/kill #2 and # 3.
What size tank?

 

I have kept 6 males together, this was not by design, just by luck as I got them al very small. I just had to remove one due to aggression to one other in particular. All the others were fine together, but always expect a certain amount of bickering.

 

I've got 24 males together. Males work fine, you may have to rehome along the way if you've got too many dominant males and too much fighting for leadership, but once you find the balance it's a functional group. Generally once males have paired and spawned they are going to struggle to lose the territorial and aggressive behavior they learn from being paired.

Females are just territorial and aggressive when they mature they leave a school of angels to pick a spawning location and then mature males come from passing schools to see if she will pair with him, she is really aggressive and will kill males she doesn't want to pair with if they can't leave the area so that doesn't work in a tank. A group of females are going to pair and hold territory and act aggressive to the rest like twice a month and more females are going to make that even worse with fighting for territory.

But males without breeding possibilities generally just set a hierarchy with a dominant fish, and just cruise along in relative peace like juveniles of the school. They all just go along to get along, it's when there's two dominant males constantly fighting for control you might have to rehome the one that keeps loosing just to break it, the more dominant fish will just run things over the lesser fish, while if you kept the weaker of the two and rehomed the dominant fish that wins the fights, the weaker fish may get challenged by others that had no shot at taking that dominant fish and leave you in the same spot and needing to get rid of another fish.

Figure it like this, in the river it's a big place, the angels school together with males and juveniles and cruise around. As females mature they leave the group and claim a territory sometimes with a male or by themselves but they leave the group and stake out a breeding spot.
The males continue to cruise around with the group, waiting for females to either mature from the juveniles or possibly they happen across an unpaired female that's ready and receptive to him in their travels.
It's all natural behaviors. Males are meant to group and school and have a social order, so do juveniles. Females at maturity become territorial and a male that pairs with a female learns very quickly to be territorial and offensively aggressive, he has no choice if he wants her to accept him.

All female won't work unless it a really big tank, all males works, and adult males and juveniles work. The males working hinges though on if the male has learned breeding behaviors from a female or not.

 

I think that it would be stressful to break up a mated pair. Do they love each other? I dont know? but they are better at monogamy than humans. When one member of a pair of pearl gourami that I had kept passed away, they other became stressed and depressed and died soon after.

It depends on the individual fish I suppose. Naturally they do not pair for life, after a few breeding cycles they tend to go their separate ways. In an aquarium setting or with captive bred fish, their behaviour may differ.

There are accounts of angelfish pairs "divorcing", which sometimes ends up with one of the two dead because the aggressor keeps chasing and the attacked has nowhere to go. But there are also accounts of angelfish pairs that have lived their entire lives together.

Go all male.
Females still may lay eggs and act like a pair.
Keep enough that bully has plenty of distractions so not to whip/kill #2 and # 3.
What size tank?

Oh no I may not have enough males then. I have 4 pairs and another 2 that look like females from their ovipositors. Was able to sex the pairs before they spawned by looking at their tubes (males pointed, females rounded) so hopefully that holds true for those 2 as well, but it's not definite until I see them spawn.

Tank is a 5ft by 2ft by 2ft.

I have kept 6 males together, this was not by design, just by luck as I got them al very small. I just had to remove one due to aggression to one other in particular. All the others were fine together, but always expect a certain amount of bickering.

Wow! What size tank did you achieve that in?

 

It depends on the individual fish I suppose. Naturally they do not pair for life, after a few breeding cycles they tend to go their separate ways. In an aquarium setting or with captive bred fish, their behaviour may differ.

There are accounts of angelfish pairs "divorcing", which sometimes ends up with one of the two dead because the aggressor keeps chasing and the attacked has nowhere to go. But there are also accounts of angelfish pairs that have lived their entire lives together.

In nature fish disappear, they die, they get separated and can't return, or predated on and pairs break up.
It's a non-issue really. Removing a male from a female, she will assume his not coming back and she can be re-paired with another suitable male of her choosing.

My pair has been together for a year, laying eggs every 15-20 days. The quantity is slowing down now, smaller spawns than when they were paired for the first 3 months. She tests him and he tests her, and if he were to back down from her and not stand there and take it, she'd refuse him and try to kill him and would be looking for a stronger male.

So yeah she plows into him and he takes it and looks for more. He comes at her and she turns upward and gives him her belly. If these things didn't happen the pair wouldn't work, she wouldn't submit to him to tell him he's worthy, and if he ran from her hits she'd think he's weak and needs to go. This is constant testing as part of the spawning ritual, even if there's no pressure of other fish raiding the eggs. She needs to know he's willing to die for the spawn, and he needs to know she's willing to submit to his dominance that she trusts him.

But if it doesn't work, she's got no problem killing him if he won't leave and she has no problem finding another male, she will move on to reproduce.

 

I've got 24 males together. Males work fine, you may have to rehome along the way if you've got too many dominant males and too much fighting for leadership, but once you find the balance it's a functional group. Generally once males have paired and spawned they are going to struggle to lose the territorial and aggressive behavior they learn from being paired.

Females are just territorial and aggressive when they mature they leave a school of angels to pick a spawning location and then mature males come from passing schools to see if she will pair with him, she is really aggressive and will kill males she doesn't want to pair with if they can't leave the area so that doesn't work in a tank. A group of females are going to pair and hold territory and act aggressive to the rest like twice a month and more females are going to make that even worse with fighting for territory.

But males without breeding possibilities generally just set a hierarchy with a dominant fish, and just cruise along in relative peace like juveniles of the school. They all just go along to get along, it's when there's two dominant males constantly fighting for control you might have to rehome the one that keeps loosing just to break it, the more dominant fish will just run things over the lesser fish, while if you kept the weaker of the two and rehomed the dominant fish that wins the fights, the weaker fish may get challenged by others that had no shot at taking that dominant fish and leave you in the same spot and needing to get rid of another fish.

Figure it like this, in the river it's a big place, the angels school together with males and juveniles and cruise around. As females mature they leave the group and claim a territory sometimes with a male or by themselves but they leave the group and stake out a breeding spot.
The males continue to cruise around with the group, waiting for females to either mature from the juveniles or possibly they happen across an unpaired female that's ready and receptive to him in their travels.
It's all natural behaviors. Males are meant to group and school and have a social order, so do juveniles. Females at maturity become territorial and a male that pairs with a female learns very quickly to be territorial and offensively aggressive, he has no choice if he wants her to accept him.

All female won't work unless it a really big tank, all males works, and adult males and juveniles work. The males working hinges though on if the male has learned breeding behaviors from a female or not.

Thank you for the very informative reply!

In what tank size did you keep 24 males together? I'm assuming it must be huge! Was there anything else to your process besides removing a male that keeps challenging the dominant one and keeps losing?

I'm not sure if I should take the risk of moving the 4 males to the 5ft since that is quite a small number and may not be enough to disperse any aggression. Or whether I should keep just a few pairs separately and hope I catch any divorces early enough to separate them before anyone gets seriously hurt.

 

It depends on the individual fish I suppose. Naturally they do not pair for life, after a few breeding cycles they tend to go their separate ways. In an aquarium setting or with captive bred fish, their behaviour may differ.

There are accounts of angelfish pairs "divorcing", which sometimes ends up with one of the two dead because the aggressor keeps chasing and the attacked has nowhere to go. But there are also accounts of angelfish pairs that have lived their entire lives together.

Oh no I may not have enough males then. I have 4 pairs and another 2 that look like females from their ovipositors. Was able to sex the pairs before they spawned by looking at their tubes (males pointed, females rounded) so hopefully that holds true for those 2 as well, but it's not definite until I see them spawn.

Tank is a 5ft by 2ft by 2ft.

Wow! What size tank did you achieve that in?

Actually a very similar size to yours - 160 x 60 x 60cm (63 x 23.6 x 23.6")

m not sure if I should take the risk of moving the 4 males to the 5ft since that is quite a small number and may not be enough to disperse any aggression.

You could try it if you have the option of moving fish around according to what works.

 

Thank you for the very informative reply!

In what tank size did you keep 24 males together? I'm assuming it must be huge! Was there anything else to your process besides removing a male that keeps challenging the dominant one and keeps losing?

I'm not sure if I should take the risk of moving the 4 males to the 5ft since that is quite a small number and may not be enough to disperse any aggression. Or whether I should keep just a few pairs separately and hope I catch any divorces early enough to separate them before anyone gets seriously hurt.

It's a 72g bowfront, a 4ft class tank. it's "busy" but everyone just cruises around.

How I did it, I put 6 juveniles in 2 years ago of which I still have 5. Of those 5, there was one pair that happened, a marble male and a platinum female.
They got moved to their own tank, and the 3 males just did their thing peacefully. After a while and a lot of trial and error, I got to freeswimming fry and raised them up to juveniles and whittled them down to 24 through culling of the slow growers (slower growing tends to be females but sometimes they just don't have the drive to thrive and don't eat and grow even slower) or for any deformities, and then trading dozens in to local fish stores for store credit of the smaller ones that were market sized.
Of the 24 I kept I put them in the 72g with the 3 one year old males and those guys basically worked as daycare and lead the group to maturity teaching them how to behave in a group. I didn't have dominance issues with these, the 1 year olds ran the show until the juveniles matured, and now a larger juvenile runs the group and those 3 older males just stepped aside, I don't think they were dominant fish to begin with, they don't have the nuchal hump and didn't get as big as the male that paired with the female.

Of the 24 I kept, 4 females appeared with maturity and tried to pair and they got rehomed to the LFSs also. ( I lean slate stones up as spawning sites so it's pretty obvious when a female claims a stone and then seeing her allow certain males to enter her space, while chasing off others, it's just obvious once you've seen it what's going on and who the female is by watching what they are all doing. But if you don't have "ideal spawning sites" set up, it can be hard identifying when a female hits maturity and who it is she "anchors" to the site, the males she is choosing from come and go freely, and males she has no interest in get chased off by her, or one of the males that has a shot if she's settled on one, he then defends her and she's further back closer to the spawning site.

All the aggression and territorialness is a learned behavior for males from spawning. The female demands it from the male. Males that don't pair and don't attempt spawning don't learn the behavior. Once it's learned it's impossible to break, it becomes their nature.

I'm due to record another short video might do it today after I clean the tank and if I do ill post a link here to see them. There's a little sparring between males but nothing serious.
This is from 2 months ago.

I kind of learned over a lifetime of keeping angels on and off, but been keeping them again for like the last 5 years where I learned the most. Kind of have to do it all and there will be "aha!" moments, just sharing what I figured out and my journey maybe it helps you or someone to get a head start in the right direction.

 

It’s totally fine to keep multiple pairs in the same tank!! Just make sure the number is even and not odd to reduce the chance of aggression!

 

It’s totally fine to keep multiple pairs in the same tank!! Just make sure the number is even and not odd to reduce the chance of aggression!

This is hit or miss depending on the pairs and amount of floor space and spawning sites. It can work, it can also fail miserably.
Best bet if tried is two pairs and a breeding slate on each side of the tank with 2 ft or better space between them, might be able to push your luck with a 3rd breeding slate in the center for a 3rd pair, the thing is the pairs need to only care about a 12" zone around their breeding site, of they defend more than that they will be crossing into each other's breeding territories and trying to kill each other or if too much intrusions eating the eggs themselves. Never heard of anyone getting fry to adults in a community setting though it normally becomes a free for all as soon as the fry are freeswimmers.

Safest bet is a single breeding pair in a 29g or bigger with a 20g-29g to raise the fry in until they turn to juveniles which they then need a bigger tank to finish the grow out to market acceptable size. If going all in to breed angels, I'd really recommend 2x 29gs, and 3x55g per pair to give you flexibility, the pair will spawn every 15-20 days and takes like 3 months to market size the 3x 55g gives you room to separate by sizes and keep a couple sets of spawns going during the time period.
Trial and error I suppose. It can work with a couple pairs in a tank for some people, just never heard of the fry making it like that.

 

It's a 72g bowfront, a 4ft class tank. it's "busy" but everyone just cruises around.

How I did it, I put 6 juveniles in 2 years ago of which I still have 5. Of those 5, there was one pair that happened, a marble male and a platinum female.
They got moved to their own tank, and the 3 males just did their thing peacefully. After a while and a lot of trial and error, I got to freeswimming fry and raised them up to juveniles and whittled them down to 24 through culling of the slow growers (slower growing tends to be females but sometimes they just don't have the drive to thrive and don't eat and grow even slower) or for any deformities, and then trading dozens in to local fish stores for store credit of the smaller ones that were market sized.

What size did you choose which to keep and which to cull at? Or did you regularly remove a few at a time (like maybe monthly) over the course of the few months it took them to grow to market size?

I have a 2ft cube (filled up to roughly 45 gallons) and a 3ft by 1.5ft by 1.5ft, both with only peaceful bottom dwellers (corydoras or kuhli loaches) so I have the extra space if I ever plan to go the same route!

Of the 24 I kept I put them in the 72g with the 3 one year old males and those guys basically worked as daycare and lead the group to maturity teaching them how to behave in a group. I didn't have dominance issues with these, the 1 year olds ran the show until the juveniles matured, and now a larger juvenile runs the group and those 3 older males just stepped aside, I don't think they were dominant fish to begin with, they don't have the nuchal hump and didn't get as big as the male that paired with the female.

Very interesting that the younger ones learned from the older ones how to live in relative peace in a group.

Of the 24 I kept, 4 females appeared with maturity and tried to pair and they got rehomed to the LFSs also. ( I lean slate stones up as spawning sites so it's pretty obvious when a female claims a stone and then seeing her allow certain males to enter her space, while chasing off others, it's just obvious once you've seen it what's going on and who the female is by watching what they are all doing. But if you don't have "ideal spawning sites" set up, it can be hard identifying when a female hits maturity and who it is she "anchors" to the site, the males she is choosing from come and go freely, and males she has no interest in get chased off by her, or one of the males that has a shot if she's settled on one, he then defends her and she's further back closer to the spawning site.

All the aggression and territorialness is a learned behavior for males from spawning. The female demands it from the male. Males that don't pair and don't attempt spawning don't learn the behavior. Once it's learned it's impossible to break, it becomes their nature.

Ah I see, I have observed that from a pair I had to rehome too but I didn't know that this was something that applied to angelfish in general! Thank you for sharing this information, I've learnt a lot just from reading your replies!

The male of that pair had spawned with other females before and was not overly aggressive, but the female he eventually bonded with was incredibly aggressive and he became so too. I removed the female to a separate tank to see how it would go, but when pairing with other females he still displayed that incredible level of aggression. They were fantastic parents and if they were born and raised in the wild, I think out of all the pairs I have had they would be the most successful. I ended up rehoming that pair to a friend who has more interest in breeding angelfish.

I'm due to record another short video might do it today after I clean the tank and if I do ill post a link here to see them. There's a little sparring between males but nothing serious.
This is from 2 months ago.

That's as peaceful of a cichlid tank as I have ever seen! Very nice! It is what I hope to be able to see in my tanks one day. I'm okay with some aggression as long as it's not to the point of fins being halved or severe injuries since it's not very fair to the ones having to endure that.

I kind of learned over a lifetime of keeping angels on and off, but been keeping them again for like the last 5 years where I learned the most. Kind of have to do it all and there will be "aha!" moments, just sharing what I figured out and my journey maybe it helps you or someone to get a head start in the right direction.

Thank you for sharing the knowledge you have accumulated through lots of experience! I definitely find it helpful and I am sure it will help many others that come across this thread.

 

Culling is kind of an ongoing thing at different stages, with fry you'll notice "belly sliders" the don't swim much and tend to stay on the bottom pop off once in a long while but basically scavenge off the bottom, they don't grow well, usually pickup internal bacterial infections from eating off the bottom, and they just don't work out so they can be culled. Then there's the point where the fry start taking "mini angelfish" form. Sometimes some of them get stuck in like a football shape,they don't take that diamond shape of the angelfish, they can be culled, they aren't going to be right. Shortly after this point and nearing dime size body, you can see their eyes and gill plates really well and cull for those deformities, like missing eyes or short gill plates and exposed gills.
After that nearing nickel to quarter bodies you'd then cull for like really bad dorsal or ventral fin issues, they will be of size to really tell if the dorsal will be extremely bent or its missing a ventral fin or two, you can likely see if that's working out from the point they take the angel form if a ventral or both don't develop.

Just saying culling is a necessary evil, they have hundreds of fry every 2-3 weeks, you can't really keep feeding and raising one's that just aren't going to work out as fish you'd want to keep, or fish a store could really sell.