Send in the Clowns - Clown Fish Breeding

[Ross]

Well here goes my attempt at breeding clowns.

My female is Black and White and about 3 years old.
The male is a true Percula, slightly younger at about 2-1/2 years.

They have been tending to laying and protecting eggs since she was about a year old until March of this year. I pulled the rock that they lay their eggs on and transferred it to my grow out tank for the hatching rather than staying up all night. Well, removing their love nest kept them from wanting to get funky until last night. (Sept 16)

This time around, I have rotifers cultured, phytoplankton to feed said rotifers and a 14 gallon biocube set up for the fry to be transferred to at some ungodly hr of the day.

Without any further ado here is night 2 of the eggs with the male diligently watching over them.

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2878/9796094563_0d6b6e5cb2_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9796094563/)


http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2845/9796034524_6767a06de2_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9796034524/)

[mrhasan]

Dibssssssssssss :mrgreen:

[Ross]

Dibssssssssssss :mrgreen:

Sure, but lets see if they survive the metamorphosis first.

I've lost the other 2 batches that I have made an effort on after 3-4 days.

[tang daddy]

For the first little while you should have them in a 15g with a sponge filter, aren't you concerned that the little fry may end up in your Bc rear compartment?

[Ross]

For the first little while you should have them in a 15g with a sponge filter, aren't you concerned that the little fry may end up in your Bc rear compartment?


Yup, that is why I have glued a piece of plastic over the returns. :biggrin:

[Treebeard]

Following along...good luck with the children!

[Ross]

3rd Night for the eggs.


http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5510/9812295824_e5bd362573_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9812295824/)

[Dreadful]

oh man! i have the exact same two clowns but my male is the black one! i've always wanted to breed them but it seems like soo much work..

very curious to see what kind of colors you get from them though! im definitely going to be keeping an eye on this thread :)

[Ross]

4th night. Spines are forming

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3814/9831430665_7bfcdf88b2_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9831430665/)

[Ross]

5th night. More Defined Eyes


http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3743/9847911346_750943b705_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9847911346/)

[gregzz4]

Very kool :smile:
Following along

[Ross]

Pupils formed


http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7317/9877803314_a87ae1185f_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9877803314/)

[Ross]

7th Night.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7375/9890815054_7f0185a8db_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9890815054/)

[Ross]

You cant see it in the picture, but their hearts are beating away.


http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7302/9910170456_e5c780393b_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9910170456/)

[mrhasan]

Those look like balloons with eyes :mrgreen:

[eli@fijireefrock.com]

quite interesting,...good luck and hope they make it,would love to have few when ready..

[GoFish]

Thanks for sharing and great photos! Following along...

[LoJack]

Amazing photos!

Good Luck. I have a pair of black clowns that have repeatedly laid eggs but I've never removed them from my tank. I look forward to following your progress and seeing your success. Hopefully I can learn enough from your experience to give it a shot myself.

[Ross]

More bone structure to the spine/tail.
Hearts beating stronger.


http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7435/9934559864_2c33b2e9e5_c.jpg
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9934559864/)


I stayed up till 1:00 waiting for these little guys to hatch. (in the dark with no pumps running)
Needless to say they didn't hatch.
Tonight perhaps.

I keep my display tank at 78-79.
Cooler temps slow the rate that they develop/hatch.
I've had eggs take as long as 12 days before.

[Myka]

Great pics!

[Werbo]

This is a great thread. Love the updates.

[Ross]

HATCH NIGHT!

Photo taken at 9:00
Lights out at 10:30. Free swimming at 11:15

I'll give them a day in the dark before attempting photos of the free swimming fry.


http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7388/9945592903_83964c301c_c.jpg
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/9945592903/)

[LoJack]

Amazing!!

[daplatapus]

That's awesome. Great pics. Thanks for sharing and continuing to do so :)

[Kryptic4L]

congrats and best of luck on the new kiddos

[Zoaelite]

That settles it, clown breeding will happen in the future!

Thanks for the post & photos, some wicked shots there.

[Ross]

Well, its been an interesting journey... The fry are now 6 night old.

When my lights were scheduled to go out, I turned off all my pumps and waited...
...about 45 minutes later, the fry started popping from there eggs and swimming around in a jerky fashion.
They populated my 3' tank from one side to the other by the time they were done hatching.
I took a flashlight, dimmed it by placing a few layers of paper towel over the end and set it up shining down into the tank on my eurobrace.

MY wife and I then took turns vacuuming them via a Ø1/4" silicone air line into a 5 gallon tank I had previously set up.

I filled it with display tank water and set a 50w jager heater to the same as the display.

There were many fry that were not too attracted to the light, but would rather hang around the sand bed in the flashlights beam.
So I took a ridgid airline, flared the end with a glass drill bit and finished extracting them with it.

I wrapped the 5 gallon in a garbage bag and kept it dim in the room.

My rotifers were slow to recover from a vacation I took a month prior. So I was in a mad search to find some live ones.
At the time there were no LFS carrying them. Some stores had no clue what I was talking about, others had the default "In our next shipment" answer.
One recently set up store that was up until recently a vendor managed to connect me with a local breeder that was very friendly and willing to share his knowledge and his rotifers for a small fee.
A search of Kijiji located a local person selling clown fish. Naturally if you have small clown fish you have fry, so I contacted them and managed to pick up some from him also.

The first night, there was approximately 15-20 that died off. (The turn into a clear white corpse fairly quickly. Presumably due to the high concentration of rotifers in the tank.)

The second and sequential night there have been 4-6 clowns dieing off.

I estimate that there are somewhere in the neighbor hood of 120 actively swimming on day #6.

They should be metamorphosing shortly, So I have to get my brine shrimp going.

Taking decent photos has been challenging until I had the realization that external flash is the way to go...

[Ross]

Day 6:

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3751/10048581764_831862b02e_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10048581764/)

LARGE mouths for eating small Rotifers:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7321/10048581974_0c072eb63d_c.jpg
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10048581974/)

Cruising around with an open mouth:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7341/10048726553_bfef74c370_c.jpg
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10048726553/)

Eye control is fully functional at this point:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7333/10048643506_39554601f0_c.jpg
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10048643506/)

[gregzz4]

Great pics
Good luck Dad

[Coralgurl]

Ahhhhmazing pics!! This is one of the coolest threads ever! Thanks for sharing! Good luck

[Eduardo]

Very cool. Great job on the pics and updates.

[Azzkr]

Great pictures must be very hard to get pics of those tiny fish. You must of had to take a insane amount of pics to get those few good ones. Keep up the good work.

[Ross]

Thanks everyone.

The depth of field (area in focus) with a macro lens is small to begin with, add in the erratic movements of the fish and yeah, it took "a few shots" to get them in focus.
At times there was a bit of the "spray and pray" approach to getting them but this proved less effective than sitting idly by patiently waiting.

I like how the rotifers are captured along with the fry. The fry are smaller than a grain of rice and the rotifers are just dust compared to them.

[LoJack]

Those photos are unbelievably good considering the size of the fry. I remember trying to shoot my Paretroplus Menarambo fry and they were impossible and they were much bigger than this.

Incredible shots and please continue to update the thread ... I'd love to try this in the future ... and you appear to be having great success thus far.

Keep up the good work!

[Ross]

Those photos are unbelievably good considering the size of the fry....
...Incredible shots and please continue to update the thread ... I'd love to try this in the future ... and you appear to be having great success thus far.

Keep up the good work!


Thanks!

I'll keep this thread going for better or worse.
Hopefully for better.

I'm going to try for another round of photos this weekend.

[Kryptic4L]

Thanks!

I'll keep this thread going for better or worse.
Hopefully for better.

I'm going to try for another round of photos this weekend.

Ya stop slacking dude. Get on it. :)

[Ross]

Without further ado. I present a clown that has survived the metamorphosis from a larvae into a fish.
Note the first white stripe behind his eyes and the slight orange color.


http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7436/10156124365_680b5a390e_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10156124365/)

All but that one are still larvae. Slightly larger, but defiantly faster and hungrier.


http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2848/10156119265_4c9e4a29f0_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10156119265/)

There have been about 6-10 die in the last few days.
My guess is that they just couldn't survive the changes.
My phyto is being used up at an alarming rate and as a result the rotifers are not as gut loaded as they could be.

My brine shrimp are not hatching anywhere near 90-100%. As a result it is difficult to collect them without getting eggs/empty eggs in the mix.
I think that the cooler basement that I have them in is the main contributing factor to this. The next batch will be upstairs where it's warmer.

[kien]

very cool! Also, that sounds like a lot of work :lol: Still cool though!

[Ross]

I'm a few days behind in posting...
This entry is based on Oct. 14, 2013.

Its been another week of watching the clowns larvae slowly turn into clown fish.
Some are still very much larval in appearance.
Most are getting there middle stripe.
Not a fast process, but they are progressing.

In my last post, I started feeding baby brine shrimp (BBS).
The extreme difficulty in separating the live shrimp from the egg casings and the unhatched eggs is very apparent in this next photo.
Some of the fish are smart enough to reject the eggs in their shells. Some others not so much.
They have been chowing down on the stray eggs that have made it into the tank.
This is not good.
I imagine that these fish are destine to die as a result of an obstruction of their intestines.


http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2861/10323046173_6e944de547_c.jpg
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10323046173/)

[Ross]

Post for Tuesday Oct. 15, 2013

I have been observing the babies rather closely after photographing them last night.
The bloated stomachs of some are diminishing in size. Hopefully this is due to to them digesting or at least expelling the unhatched eggs. I witnessed one fry squeeze one out.
It didn't look all that friendly of a process.
Dart and stop.
Wiggle, dart, wiggle, stop.
Drop an egg and victory lap.

Come to think of it my parents dog would do the same thing when he ate too many dog biscuits.


The last few nights I have been feeding powdered flake in addition to the rotifers. They are starting to accept flake more and more. Still not as much as the rotifers that they go spastic for, but its a start.

There have only been a few more die offs. Mostly tiny larvae that haven't morphed yet.

I had the guys at Concept make up a simple 15 gallon tank to move the current batch into in the next week or so.
It's a good thing that I did because, my mated pair laid more eggs last night.
So I have about 8 days to get it all set up.


http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5548/10322884435_2ccf7a8470_c.jpg
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10322884435/)

[IanWR]

Thank you so much for documenting this! I look forward to this far more than the disappointing new fall tv shows. :)

What are your plans for your ever growing hoard of clownfish?

- Ian

[titus]

Hello

Thanks for sharing this. This is one amazing thread.


Titus

[Ross]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

What are your plans for your ever growing hoard of clownfish?

Despite my daughters desire to keep every one of them, I will have to sell most of them off.
I will keep a couple through to adult hood to see how they color up over the long haul.

I've talked to one store in about the potential of buying batches of them.
They were not all that interested in "mixed clowns".

A few of the other stores are already well stocked by other local breeders.
There are enough stores around I don't think it will be a concern.

Canreef members will get the first go at them.

[SpateD]

Hybrid clowns are going to be tough to sell! On a side note, I have raised Mocha (Black O x Orange O) clowns... With some DaVinci grades (also known as Gladiator/Fancy White), and they are proving difficult also.

Stores in Calgary are not keen on getting back to us breeders about these things. It's likely I'll have to look towards selling to a wholesaler.

[mrhasan]

Hybrid clowns are going to be tough to sell! On a side note, I have raised Mocha (Black O x Orange O) clowns... With some DaVinci grades (also known as Gladiator/Fancy White), and they are proving difficult also.

Stores in Calgary are not keen on getting back to us breeders about these things. It's likely I'll have to look towards selling to a wholesaler.

Why are stores not hybrid friendly?

[SpateD]

I think it may be as simple as owners of LFS' don't see them on their lists... and therefore either don't know what they are (marketing/name wise), or what to list them for.

Or that big name breeders are not mixing species that often, if at all.

I offered to make some grades of Davinci (C-Quest named them Gladiator) clowns available in Calgary, and have not heard back on it yet.. I also have asked around for prices on regular Davinci's and store owners don't have prices on those.

[Ross]

In preparation for the next batch of eggs hatching, on Wednesday evening, I transferred the first batch of clowns over to a new 24" x 12" x 12" (15 gallon) tank from Concept.
Apparently they also make small tanks, not just 16' display tanks.
I tossed in a sponge filter/air stone that has been seeding in my sump for a month, matched the temp and salinity as close as possible to the 5 gallon fry tank the day prior.
30-40 fry have survived my blundering's and are now rather fast swimming little guys when they want to be.
Counting will have to be done via a photo to really have any accuracy.

Based on the first batch taking 9 days to hatch, the current batch should have hatched last night and it did to some degree, but we will get to that in a bit.

My DIY LED lights usually dim from 8:30 to lights out at 10:30. I reprogrammed the apex so that lights out would be at 9:00 so that I'm not up till 1:00 fishing.
The return pump and wp-40 also would shut off at this time. My basement, where the tank is located, was completely black and they were left to hatch in peace.
Around 11:00 I snuck down to peak in on them fully expecting there to be 150+ fry darting around picking off rotifers that I dumped into the display earlier.
Well there were a few free swimming fry. By a few I mean 3... ...yes, 3...

As my wife and I were shining a flash light into the tank several more started to emerge from the cluster of eggs. Typically after the male fanned hard at them to dislodge them.
We siphoned up about 25 fry before declaring it too late to be doing this.
More than 3/4 of the eggs were still stuck to their rock when we headed off to bed at 1:00.
I restored all the default settings in the apex and went to bed. :sad:

Shockingly, this morning, the remainder of the eggs were still firmly attached to the live rock, So I'll be vacuuming up more fry tonight from the looks of it. :biggrin:

[Ross]

My fish are now 34 days old.
A fair bit has changed since my last batch of photos.
First off all except 1 of the fry have transformed into fish. For some reason 1 of them is special and not progressing like the others, yet hasn't died so he remains.
I changed tanks to a 15 gallon as my previous post indicated. This transition was smooth with zero losses!

They are only 25-50% longer than when they first hatched. They are a lot larger in girth though. Probably close to 3-4 fry tall and 3 fry across.

Their stripes are forming well.
They appear to grow in sections at a time that eventually form a singular line. The last photo illustrates this the best. They change the color of a small section and it fades in, then change the next small section until it is one.
Their Pectoral fins are all coming in black.
They look hilarious darting around and flashing them to stop.

Some have attitude and chase others around. Some just chill in one spot for a bit.

Currently I'm, well actually more accurately my wife is, feeding them powdered tetra bits a few times during the day. One of the perks of a stay at home mom is I get a full time fish sitter... (I imagine the back of my head will hurt for that one)
Anyways, the food is reddish in color and you can really see the quantity in the stomachs of the fish.
They also occasionally get crushed flake for a bit of variety.

Here are the pics...

This is the left side:
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3771/10568763573_fc143c40b9_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10568763573/)

This is the right side:
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2868/10568506016_7264dd2724_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10568506016/)

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5496/10568764523_e08956aecf_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10568764523/)

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7449/10568763793_fd3be5cb83_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10568763793/)

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2877/10568488435_d8d644a877_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossmct/10568488435/)