A Family Affair!

I like to try to plan my angel breeding efforts so that I don't have any very young fish about during the summer holiday period; that way, when I head off for my summer holiday, I can leave what fish I have in the confident knowledge that an occational visit from parents will be all that's necessary to keep them alive and healthy. The only down side to this plan is that, until recently, it had been a couple of months since I last had a pair in a breeding tank.

I've now set up 3 pairs and, so far they all seem to be getting on.

Pair number 1 is this couple

Female is a smokey blue, hopefully a ghost, and hopefully without a hidden gold gene.


Male is a smokey ghost pinoy, sadly he wouldn't flare his fins fully for the camera



No eggs yet, but I have my fingers crossed for the next day or two.

Pair number 2 have wrigglers due to free swimming tomorrow or wednesday, unfortunately there are no photos as they were getting a bit edgy about my taking photos of the first pair in the adjacent tank.
Mother is a smokey ghost pinoy sibling to the male in pair one. Father is my favourite blue chocolate here's an old photo of him :-


He's uncle to the female in pair 1

For the same reason there are no new photos of pair 3
Male is my favourite blue marble male



Whilst the female I have him paired with is smokey paraiba who's a sibling of the blue chocolate in pair 2.
This pair laid eggs the day after pair 2, but they all fungused, I have fingers crossed for their next attempt.

Great news for you then Rob as all look good.The Blue choc Male is a real stunner to say the least as is the Smokey Ghost Pinoy i also like the pairing with the Blue Marble x Smokey Paraiba as im sure they will give you some great young.Good luck with them all.

As always rob Stunning pics how do you get the super glue to work under water ,
With these crossings do you think the blue will get even more intense in there younge or are you trying
to get more pattening in the body, what ever you are aiming at you have some excellent stock fish there.
cheers Tony

The funny thing is, whenever I put a pair together aiming at a particular result, I always find that my favourite fish in the batch aren't the ones I was aiming for, but some of the incedental "by-products".
In this case, my aim with pairs 1 & 2 is to produce pinoys, and my hope is that at least one of these pairs will give me some pinoy paraibas. Either way it will at least confirm if the non pinoy parent is a ghost. Similarily with pair 3 I'm hoping for, but not expecting, marble paraibas, but if not, I at least get guaranteed blue marble ghosts.
Beyond that, whilst I'm always keen to add more colour, my main focus at the moment is finnage & body shape.
BTW, pair one spawned today, so fingers crossed!

Beautiful fish Rob. Great pairings, I really like the first pair, there's quite a few nice possibilities out of those. Hopefully you'll have plenty of young for sale over Xmas.

Hopefully you'll have plenty of young for sale over Xmas.

Hopefully! although a shortage of angels is not something I usually suffer from, just an imbalance of varieties! At present I seem to have too many smokeys and not enough blues!
Pair #2's babies are just going free swimming (ATM about 1/3rd are swimming, the rest are getting ready for take off).
Unfortunately pair #1's eggs have gone this morning.

Great pairings

I've got lots of other interesting pairings in the pipeline, just waiting for a free tank!

Nice Angels and even better pictures!! Great work!

Looking forward to seeing the results.

Managed to get some more shots tonight

As noted earlier, pair number 1 ate their eggs, but pair number 2 are doing a good job with their youngsters, I can already tell the baby pinoys apart from the the baby blues.



Mum is quite a bit younger & smaller than Dad


This is pair number 3
Male


Female


Still waiting for these to spawn again, but in the mean time I've put a fourth pair together, and they laid today. I'm quite optimistic for this batch as despite only being together for 3 days they seem very "together" and very aggressive in defending the eggs from yours truly!

Mother is sister to the male in pair 3


This photo was taken 2 days ago


Male is a smokey blushing veiltail heterozygous for pb.

Another great looking pair Rob! I'm thinking you'll need to commandeer the quarantine room for all the fry!!

Another great looking pair Rob! I'm thinking you'll need to commandeer the quarantine room for all the fry!!

Maybe not quite yet, although the eggs are still there this morning, most have fungused.
I'm not too surprised at this as I find that pairs often need a while to get used to each other and/or the water quality in the breeding tank.
Also the male is quite young (not quite 7 months old yet) so although he went through the motions, he might not have delivered the goods!

Top quality breeding stock Rob, It will be very interresting to see the young in two mounths
time there should be some very nice marking on the young.
All the best Tony

Little bit of an update...

Pair 1 still keep eating the eggs

Pair 2, after 2 weeks with them the babies were eating the parents, so they were removed, and the really pleasing news is I've got paraibas in there which means I have pinoy paraibas! Like this one :-



Although all should be smokeys or chocolates, at this stage the smokey hasn't yet come in, so it's easy to tell the ghosts,


From those without a stripeless gene


And the blushing ones stand out clearly



at least with the non-pinoy babies, it's not quite so obvious on the pinoys....



Pair 3 have a little shoal of about 30-40 youngsters, but only about a week free swimming, so too early to say if there are any paraiba marbles

and pair 4 I'm sure will do well, once the male starts producing the necessary juices!

Fantastic! The smokey pinoy is beautiful and the blue chocolates realy catch my eye.
Exceptional quality, colours and stunning fry Rob!!!

Just 9 days on and they've changed so much. They will have been free swimming for a month tomorrow and the smokey pattern is starting to come in on many of them






I've got high hopes for this batch, they seem to be growing pretty quickly and the fins particularly seem to be developing very nicely.

They are all looking really good Rob & they all seem to have fintastic finnage.

Brilliant pics as always. Amazing how they 'develop' into Angelfish.

Hi Rob
Love that blue chocolate
Dave

Love that blue chocolate

He's one of my favorites too

I've moved 35 of the paraibas into a separate tank, which makes them easier to photograph!

Pinoy Paraiba




smokey paraiba

They are comeing on really well Rob & no doubt they will all be stunners in a few months.

Photo update time......

Like Father(this is the father at about 4 months old)

Like son.....


A few more siblings.....

I call this one "Scream".....

All looking good as Rob & scream is stunning already.

Paul

How much for Scream? lmao

Awesome pics and stunning angels.

Edit. Rob, are these some of the youngsters coming in we have been chatting about? I'm getting excited.

Yep, these are they!

Just thought I'd post a couple of photos of one of my favorite pinoys from this batch, now that he's thinking about starting a family of his own!




He does have a slight curl to the top of his dorsal, but I'm prepared to forgive that because of the width of his fins, especially the anal fin!