Frusterated with angel pair

[bozco]

They paired up great for awhile, swam together everywhere, you'd never see them more than six inches apart in the tank at all.

When first introduced to each other they laid, of course they weren't really bonded at the time, so the eggs were never fertilized and the pair of them spent a few days eating them.

Then, after they'd been showing the pair bond for a few months they laid again, and things started to go wrong. The male would try to get close to the eggs to fertilize them, and the female would chase him away as she ate them. That was fine, I wasn't going to make any attempts to save any fry because I'm not set up for breeding, and they went right back to being a nice pair, then they started to fight without any warning I could see. The female ripped up the male's tail so I moved him out.

Then later I tried to reintroduce them, and the male ripped the female apart, so I put her in a tank beside the male's tank and tried again in a few weeks. They started to fight constantly, going for the lips instead, so I put up a tank divider and they showed signs of agression through the divider.

Having sold some of my fish I moved the female to her own tank again, and when I got around to cleaning the divider after pulling it out, I found eggs along the sides of it. The fish were trying to spawn through the divider. I'm not going to put them back together, don't want anymore scars on my female, but its a rather annoying thing to have fish that are always trying to breed and kill each other at the same time.

Has anyone else ever had this problem?

[Garhan]

Have you tried putting in a fast swimming dither fish. Like a Rainbow or something along that line. Often dither fish will distract the pair from killing/attacking each other and there aggression is put towards the dither fish.

Garhan

[bozco]

Fish in a state of indecisive agitation eh?

I did, for awhile, have some danios in there, but not with the angels and I couldn't stand the way they swam, like they were being fast forwarded. I gave them to my chemistry teacher's son

I did, however, have a group of twelve cardinal tetras, but that didn't seem to help.

I have been considering a group of tiger barbs, in the hopes that what I have heard about keeping them in groups of six or more keeping them from fin nipping, but it comes down to money, which I am very short of at the moment.

I hadn't heard of that though, 'dither fish' thanks for getting me to look it up. :thumbs: