Angelfish Death

Majjie

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I had a young pair of Koi angelfish - I don't know if they were a male/female pair but they tended to hang out together and were really peaceful with each other. I'd had them about a year and their body length is/was about 1.5 - 2 inches.

They got stressed about six weeks ago when I put a pair of gold rams in the tank. The male ram chased the angels about. He didn't physically harm them but they tended to swim into things trying to get out of his way- so I moved the rams out. They then had a few weeks with a large female pearl gourami as company. She ignored them but they tended to keep well out of her way. (She is now back in her own tank)

For the past three weeks their tank has been back to normal - it's a 72 litre, 45 cm high tank and their normal companions are 6 blue emperor tetras, 4 glowlight tetras, 2 glowlight rasboras, 4 sparkling gouramis and 2 otocinclus. I know this isn't enough space to be a good long term home for the angels but it is a well planted tank with bogwood and stone to divide it up. I am also planning on getting a much bigger tank towards the end of the year.

For the past two weeks the tank has seemed fine, except that the angels stopped eating dry food of any sort. They would grab bits but then immediately spit them out. I didn't worry too much because there were no other symptoms at all and I feed live food once a week and frozen food once a week - which they were still enthusiastically eating. This morning though, the largest of the two angels was dead :sad:

No symptoms at all, that I could see.

The only other change to the tank was that I added four Amano shrimp a couple of weeks ago - to deal with the hair algae on the bog wood (which they have been absolutely brilliant at :good: ). I suppose they could have introduced a disease.

Any ideas on what could have caused the death? Should I treat the remaining angel with anything - s/he's very active at the moment swimming all over the tank (but still not eating the dry food)
Should I get another angelfish to keep the remaining one company (after waiting a while to check that s/he's ok) - or should I wait until I get the bigger tank

Any comments welcome - it's such a horrible shock isn't it when you find a fish dead for apparently no reason ???? .
 
Please post the results of water tests, as well as tank temperature. What are you feeding for live & frozen food?
 
Maybe the other fish introduced something to the water that the angels could not handle?
 
You may be right Spyderdf. I should have quarantined the shrimp but my so called quarantine/hospital tank is full of platy fry and two honey gouramis that were being bullied - so I took a chance. The other fish were from my own tanks but I guess they could have been carriers of something.

I have just changed about 10% of the water - which I do every week. Stats (before the latest water change) were:

NH3 0
NO2 0
NO3 12.5 - 25
pH 7.5
temperature has crept up to 30 degrees in the last couple of days (room temp is 28)

I have an internal Fluval Biolife filter with trickle chamber and I've always thought it to be very efficient. I have noticed that there's a lot more gunge (sorry, mulm :D ) in the gravel since I got the shrimp but I don't think the water quality has suffered.

I feed them live daphnia and bloodworm (they had bloodworm on Sunday) and frozen bloodworm or brine shrimp.
I also fed them mushy peas and a piece of cucumber last week (I was worried about there not being enough algae for the ottos) but I don't think the angels ate much of that, if any.

The survivor is still looking active - but then I never noticed anything wrong with the one that died :sad:
 
I agree that something could have been introduced by new tankmates. Sounds like the proper diet & temp, only reason I asked is that I've come across folks who try to keep angels at 75F & feed only flakes, leading to constipation & bacterial issues.
 
I guess it could have been a bacterial problem.

I'll leave things a couple of weeks and see if all the other fish are ok.

If they are, should I get another companion for the angel? And if so, should it be another Koi - do colour types of angels tend to prefer each other?

Thanks for the help
 

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