Clownfish babies

TANKSALOT · Apr 6, 2010

Very, very nice!!
It is one of my goals to breed some clowns.
Thanks for sharing your success with us. Everything I can learn will be helpful when I finally get to take that plunge.

TANKSALOT

phil519 · Apr 6, 2010

clowns101 said:
Well sounds like we are wanting to breed some fish so I am going to make a sticky about it!

Phil519-Would you alow me to use your pictures for this thread on breeding?

austin no problem.

(oops I meant for this quote to be in the next post) - sorry for the extra post!

phil519 · Apr 6, 2010

Mr E Wrasse said:
I checked them the morning of the 9th day and they were still there around 8am and all gone when i looked again around 11am. I suppose it's possible that the female ate them. I did try to get them to lay the eggs on a small round terracotta plate.. but they always chose the rock instead.

yeah - unfortunately that is the most likely scenario. For whatever reason they did not hatch "on time" and the female probably devoured them.

Don't be too disappointed - that kind of massive nutrition (hundreds of baby fry) for the female is great for her and typically afterwards the next batch is larger than usual.

tanksalot said:
Very, very nice!!
It is one of my goals to breed some clowns.
Thanks for sharing your success with us. Everything I can learn will be helpful when I finally get to take that plunge.

Honestly it's not too bad - the main hurdle is getting a supply of rotifers and keeping the culture steady.

clowns101 · Apr 6, 2010

Do you have pictures of like your rot bucket,and mabey your phyto cultures?

MAKcorals · Apr 6, 2010

This is awesome!

phil519 · Apr 7, 2010

clowns101 said:
Do you have pictures of like your rot bucket,and mabey your phyto cultures?

I could take a pic - but it's not anythign special - just an old salt bucket with an airline. This is an old pic when I tried rots from mofib I got at MACNA in Atlantic City:

That culture crashed and I used a starter batch from Reed.

The food is all Rotifer Diet by Reed Mariculture. I drop about 4~6 drops a day in the bucket. Harvest the rots by using a sieve purchased from brineshrimp direct like this:

while I am at it - an old pic of my ghetto bbs set up. I placed the soda bottle in a bucket that was heated -to keep the temp around 70. I found the bbs hatched at a better rate at that temp. We don't keep the house very warm during winter.

phil519 · Apr 21, 2010

updates:

my pair have been a little bit too regular in their breeding - but with the increased frequency has resulted in lower yield. I don't know why but as I am not pulling the eggs from the display, I have no choice but to wait for them to hatch - and when they don't hatch, momma eats them.

So in the past month or so - rather than have say 100 fry to care for - Ive only saved 20. Kinda sucks because the amount of effort/work is the same whether you have one fry or 300 in a tank.

Anyways - they did their thing again this past saturday and the eggs should be ready by sunday night - monday night latest.

Some updated pics of the batch from this thread:

and a pic of the pair during egg laying:

Sorry for the bad pics - my goal is a new nikon or canon dslr...topic for another thread!

phil519 · Apr 21, 2010

different pics but photoshopped to try and get the right color:

whip1 · Apr 21, 2010

wow that is sooooo cool I love babies

congrats

Jason300zxTT · Apr 26, 2010

so jealous. wish i knew how to get mine to spawn.

phil519 · May 21, 2010

I don't have a magic potion or barry white music. The pair just do their thing. They continue to lay eggs about every 2~3 weeks. I don't have enough tanks or time to manage it all. I'm already stuffed with a 29 gallon (depicted above) a 5 gallon hex (with 4 babies despite my lax efforts at raising them) and a 10 gallon (with possibly another 30 - i can't count as they move around too much). The one recent change has been a use of Reed M's otohime as a supplement/replacement for artemia/baby brine shrimp. It works well enough and makes life easier in terms of all the maintenance involved with raising bbs daily. I'll try and get more recent pics. Lately i've been drooling at a DSLR camera and I'm hoping that addition will make my pics look far better.

ordered the "starter" kit which my LFS was kind enough to get for me and have ready. Here's a pic of the sample size:

SeaLifeDirect · May 22, 2010

They're cute. Congrats!

TANKSALOT · May 22, 2010

Have you had a chance to try out the Otohime samples yet?

Antonias1391 · May 22, 2010

uuggh i cant wait till mine spawn theve been a little more adiment with there cleaning of the pot tho so one can hope. gratz on the baby's always love to see little clowns

phil519 · Sep 13, 2010

Sorry - long time no update.

I don't have a breeding pair anymore - but hopefully this will incent others to try. (not that you need incentive!)
Present:
The middle bar is fully there. It will not grow anymore - this clown's dad was a mis-bar so I get like a few of the babies as mis-bar.

Past: (hatched April 27, 2010, top-down view)

My male somehow carpet surfed and now all i have is his legacy of about 20 babies left (one is shown above) and his lonesome female in the display.

As for otohime - the stuff works well except it doesn't provide any of the color one normally sees in clownfish. I will switch them over to something like a mixture of cylop-eeze freeze dried and some of the frozen stuff to get the nice deep red/orange. I liked the otohome starter pack - the clowns are less jumpy and there is less work around brine shrimp culturing/maintenance. I had some major bacterial fungo stuff growing in the inverted 2 liter after heavy use. I found it interesting that when I spoke to the girl (ugh I can't remember her name) at the Sea World behind the scene tour at Atlantis - she had the same problem with the brine shrimp for the jellyfish.

We traded some shop talk and apparently they use a freeze-dried powder like phyto to feed the brine. (I use liquid phyto from reed mariculture) and she bleaches the brine shrimp hatcheries every week or so to kill the bac.

Anyways - I don't think I will update this thread much since I no longer have a pair laying eggs every other week. :sad: But I'll probably try and find a male to pair up.