Clown Fish Breeding

[thecoralreef]

I thought I would share my newly found excitement with everybody. I have always been facinated by marine fish and breeding them. I have had many freshwater aquariums before and was breeding fancy guppies for the longest time. I switched over to saltwater aquarium keeping and have never looked back.

Now that I am in the hobby full blast, and my wife would disagree and say head over heels, I am trying my hand at breeding marine fish. I have done lots of general reading in regards to breeding marine animals and came to the conclusion that it would be easiest to start with the clown fish.

I have a display tank which is a 135 gallon tank. There is about 130 Lbs. of live rock, Red Sea Desjardin Sailfin Tang, Red Sea Purple Tang, Yellow Tang, Green Mandarin Goby, Maroon Clown, Ocellaris Clown, various soft lps and sps corals, and lots of blue hermits and astrea snails. When I first thought about breeding clown fish I went out and bought 2 Maroon clowns, not knowing that they were almost the hardest to breed of the clowns, and put them in my display tank. After about 2 months of bickering and arguing and fighting I had to take one of the maroons out before they killed each other. The one maroon clown was getting really beat up, bruised and all the fins were torn and tethered. That's how I ended up with only one marron and one ocellaris clown in the display.

Since this I designed and built a stand where I could have 2 - 20 gallon tanks and a sump all stacked onto of each other to save space. My thoughts on this system were to have a mated pair of clowns in one tank, and have a coral propogation tank in the other and have them both plumbed together to the sump underneath. I now have in the top aquarium a pair of Ocellaris clowns, and in the other aquarium I have a pair of pink skunk clowns. I say they are paired only because they are not fighting and they get along so well. I am still waiting for the day that I can say that they are a mated pair because neither pair has decided to lay eggs as of yet.

The story doesn't end hear though, it actually gets very interesting. In my display tank as you might recall I now have an Ocellaris clown fish and a Maroon clown fish. The Ocellaris is about 3 - 3.5 inches and the Maroon is about 1.5 inches long. The 2 of them always got along once I took out the second maroon clown and have never had a problem since. It was always fun watching these 2 fish in the display tank as they would swim by eachother, share the same anemone, and even cought them sleeping in the same anemone at night. I thought this weird but never gave it anymore thought. A couple months ago I noticed they were having some minor spats. Nipping a bit, the Ocellaris badgering the maroon to move, and the maroon in turn placing his body parallel to the Ocellaris and what looked to be quivering with fear. I quickly picked up my books and began to read why they were all of a sudden not geting along thinking I was going to have remove one. They weren't fighting like the maroons were so this was a bit of an inclination that something else was happening. After reading in books about the quivering and badgering I quickly came to the conclusion that they were looking for a place to lay eggs. I had to read this several times as this was a maroon clown and an ocellaris clown that were supposedly mating up. I talked to a few people, sent a few messages, checked a few forums and was assured that this would not happen between these 2 fishes. Placing the thought of them breeding in my tank was placed in the back of my mind, not very far away.

Placing my attention on the other 2 pairs of clowns I was trying to get to breed I was reading up on ways to stimulate clowns into breeding. I tried changing there light period from 12 hours to 14 hours, feeding live food and fresh food.

About a month ago when getting ready to go out of town for the weekend we were oogling the tank. After watching the hovering around a specific spot beside there anemone I noticed there was a patch of yellow on the rock. My clowns had layed eggs. Now your probably wondering which clowns layed the eggs. To my surprise it was the clowns in the display tank. The ocellaris clown and the maroon clown. I immediatly reached in and turned the rock so we could see the eggs better and take some pictures. I returned the rock back to the original postion that it was in. I don't have to tell the people who have breed clowns before that I shouldn't have done this. Let me tell you that the male clown (maroon) has got one heck of a bit. He did not like me in his space and liked it even less when I decided to move his eggs. The other thing was I may have been premature aboutgetting in there space and moving the eggs around. At this point the abandoned the eggs and they died. The eggs were all gone by the time I got back from my weekend away. No need to worry as these 2 clowns have layed eggs again about a week later. I still was not ready to rear clowns as I didn't have any green water or rotifers ready to feed them.

Once I realized that they were laying eggs I started my research on breeding clowns a little more in depth. A big help has been a book called Clownfishes - by Joyce D. Wilkerson. It's a couple year old but the information is worth it's weight in gold. I asked lots of questions in regards to my 2 clowns and again was assured that they may pair up and might even lay eggs but the eggs would probably never hatch. Well I thought this may be true as the first clutch of eggs never matured and died within 3 days. Once the second clutch of eggs came I never went near the clowns when entering the tank. I didn't want to give the clowns any reason to think I was there to bother them or give them any reason to abandon the eggs again.

The second clutch of eggs were going well in my opinion. I was excited to see the eggs there still at day 3. At day 5 I knew that the eggs were indeed fertilized as I could see little eggs and tiny bodies forming in the egg sac. What excitement this was. At day 8 the eggs got a silver sheen to the tips of the eggs and I knew that they would either hatch that night or the next. The lights went out on time and i went to bed. The next morning when I woke up I went down stairs to the tank to see what had happened. The eggs hatched. There were no eggs left in the spot that they had been. I now knew I had to get ready so as to be able to raise these little creatures.

The next clutch of eggs came only 5 days later from the time the prior clutch hatched into the tank. I will be taking pictures and keeping a log and documenting this process I take for future refernce and for you to follow my progress if you desire. I will try to take pictures of the eggs from day 1 right through to the juvenile period. I thought I would do this so I can get input from those who have done this and maybe to inspire those who may be thinking of doing the same. I am hoping that hings will transpire well over the next month but if not it can be chalked up for a learning experience. I will try to update this thread on a daily basis so you can check back as often as you want to add your comment, suggestions or questions.

The first picture I will add is of the 3 clutch of eggs from this pair. The first clutch they layed the eggs on an adjascent rock. The second clutch they layed on the glass of the aquarium directly behind there anemone. This third clutch they layed almost in the same spot as the second clutch. I placed a clay tile in the aquarium after the second clutch hatched into the tank but it may have been too late for them to decide to move there hatching place. I am hoping they will adapt to the tile for the next clutch of eggs as this would be easier to move into a rearing tank than having to scoop or siphon the newly hatched larvae out of the display tank.

Sorry for the long post but I am excited about this and thought I would share this experience for those who wish to follow.

I now have my greenwater culture and rotifers growing. I was not ready for the first 2 clutch's of eggs but will be ready for the new clutch, hopefully.

[thecoralreef]

First day of eggs. The eggs are about 1 hour old.
Date of egg laying : October 5th, 2004



Sorry about the picture but I don't have the best camera in the world.

[FishyinKY]

Mike, that is amazing and wonderful and please keep us up to date on what's going on. How they grow, progress and/or hatch!

[J_T]

When I get home, I will add the pictures of the first clutch of eggs for you Mike.

Are you going to build a shelf for making the green water?

[Mary]

I wish you the best of luck with caring for the eggs! It would be great to read and see up-dates and how things go each step of the way, so we can learn from this as well. I really hope this turns out a success for you!

[J_T]

Done right, we might have another article in the making. If only we somewhere to put them......

[Sea of Sorrow]

Awesome, Mike! I'm very excited for you! I, too, have been wanting to try raising clownfish (and even dottybacks) for quite some time now. I've just been leary of the extra time and attention required to pull it off. Maybe since the winter months are coming and I'll be indoors more, I may try it out.

[Wildcatt88]

This will be cool to watch Mike. Make us proud!

[thecoralreef]

Working on it people, I just took some pictures of day 2 of the eggs. They don't look much different but I will post a good picture anyway.

[thecoralreef]

Here is a picture of day 2 of the eggs. The eggs are only about 25 hours at this point. Sorry again for the picture as my camera sucks.

[Shark Bait]

This will be very interesting with 2 different types of clowns as the parents hopefully we can get to see the result of what they look like.
Congrats. :clap:

[wrightme43]

Thats pretty cool man. Congrats on being a expecting clownfish Daddy. Good thing you dont live with Archie Bunker.

[thecoralreef]

Here is the eggs on day 3. I took the pics last night but never got around to posting them here. So this is a picture of dad tending to the eggs. He's at the eggs fanning them every 2 minutes at least. Mom comes around once in a while to help but she really doesn't do much other than keep him close to the eggs. If he wanders to far she's over pushing him back towards the eggs.

[thecoralreef]

You can see that the eggs have gotten a little darker since the day before. I wish I had a better camera to take close ups. In a couple days you can see little eyes and pink bodies in the egg sacs. Then on the day they are going to hatch the eggs get a silvery tip to them, that's how you know they will hatch. Keep checking back as I will keep posting updates.

[Wildcatt88]

Keep us updated. Very cool man!

[Sea of Sorrow]

VERY cool!!!! Awesome documentation, Mike!

[J_T]

do you have the green water ready, or are you going to let the fry fend for themselves?

I am suprised that none of the other fish have tried to eat the eggs.

[thecoralreef]

None of the other fish can even get close to the anemone and mum's out there showing her teeth. She doesn't bite yet but she gets out in front of there face and fans out all her fins as if to say "go ahead, make my day", and then they leave and she goes back to the anemone. Green water is well underway and growing. I will post a picture later of my set up of green water and rotifers. I have a 10gallon tank with rotifers in it. I started out with about 1 liter of rotifers and I keep adding green water when needed and have about 4 gallons of rotifers now. I'll get some pics later and post them in here as well for everyone to critique.

[FishyinKY]

Mike are you going to try to leave them in the main tank or find a way to move them to another tank? I could always get them to the hatching point and even got them growing but the fish always managed to eat them when they started manuevering.
Mac

[Jimbo]

ok, mike, here's what we did at my school when we bred clowns (ocellaris, maroons, cinamons, and tomatos). when they started to hatch we siphoned them out into ten gallon tanks, putting about 5 gal of breeding tank water into the ten gallon, and a very slow stream of air from an airstone so as not to injure them.
we fed rotifers for the first week or so, introducing enriched artemia at about day 5. we added about 2 liters a day of new water until the tanks were full. also, the tanks where we put greenwater into the larval tanks seemed to grow and mature faster. artemia was constantly available to them and they got daily water changes of about 2-3 liters. after about a week they metamorphose and then we introduced sponge filters, and eventually started weaning them onto very small commercial food.
after they metamorphose you're pretty much in the clear and they're really not that difficult. hope this helps.

I can't wait to see what those little half-breeds look like!!