Why is my Angelfish so small?

[follicle]

I have two Streaked Double Dark Angelfish in my 55 gallon. I've had them both now for about 6 months and I just love watching them. I do have a question though...

One has grown to about 2-3/4 inches in width and the other has stayed tiny at about 1-1/4 inch in width. I've feed them both the same diet of flake food once daily. The smaller fish is rather active and seems relatively healthy. Is there any reason why one fish would stay extremely small and the other grow much larger?

I've posted a photo of them side by side below. Sorry for the poor quality but it was difficult getting a decent shot of them together.

Thanks for any replies!

 

[joy13]

Quality of food, temperature and water quality has a lot to do with how fast fish grow. They are beautiful, are they a smoky marble color?

 

[follicle]

Thanks for the response. Actually, they have marble-like patterns, but they're really dark in color, almost pitch black. However, you can see their stripes in the photo above, especially on the smaller one.

 

[mgamer20o0]

some get stunted at a young age or just a runt. i had a group where one kept small. even moved it to try to grow it back out and never got any bigger.

 

[WhiteDevil]

try some frozen brine and bloodworms, even beefheart.

I usually give them a third cube of brine, third cube of beefheart and a half dime size chunk of bloodworms, mixed/thawed in cup of tank water.

I keep using it cause I got smaller growing fish in the big tank right now and this is the recipe that got my angels up to size fairly quickly. I had to do it, kept them ina 28g bowfront as juves but got em a little bigger and well I got a bigger tank now. But try giving it some fry food in a syringe, it might help.