Determining age of Dwarf Angels

[Warthur]

Hey guys,
I've been looking for a golden angelfish for a while and found one at a LFS about an hour away. Animal seems to be healthy and doing well. However, I cannot determine the approximate age of the animal. It is 3" long right now and will get to be 4" as an adult. Does anyone have experience with them or similar species that could help me figure out how old this animal might be?

 

[Claus84]

Unless you can find any published studies on growth rate in Centropyge species I think it will be a difficult question to answer, I wouldn't be too concerned with age though, particularly if its not yet fully grown as I'm sure it will have a good few years of life in it yet if thats what you are concerned about?

It if helps my tank bred coral beauty has was 1" when I got her and probably only a month or 2 old, 7 months on she is now 2.5" so they do grow quickly however a rich, high protein diet of aquarium food probably plays a role in this. I also have a captive bred flame angel which is currently around 1", I saw another cb flame from the same batch in the display tank of an LFS the other day and it is considerably larger than mine, likley because I have been feeding relatively lightly so as not to foul the QT.

You could try searching fishbase.org for info on growth rates, I had a quick scan for a couple of centropyge sp and growth info was lacking but worth searching through them. I sometime have to age fw fish for work which can be done by taking a scale and looking at the growth rings under a microscope but I'm not sure if this would work with tropical species, in any case you would have to buy the fish first and even then most likely wouldnt want to scrape a scale from it!

 

[Warthur]

Thanks for input. From most forum posts/articles I've read on this it seems like wild specimins grow about .25" per month or so after their larval period (carries based on species) based off of the info it seems like any 3" centropyge should be somewhere between 14 and 18 months old