My favorite part of this hobby is just watching my fish and observing their behavior. I keep 2 reef tanks, each tank contains a pair of clownfish. Over this past weekend I had the idea to swap the the females.. I took my female black snowflake and put her in with my male platinum storm, (pair 1), and my female platinum storm went in with my male midnight lightning, (pair 2). I didn't anticipate that there would be any fighting among the clowns because they're similar in size and both females are considerably larger than the males. My assumption was correct because 3 days later and no beef between the clowns. Pair 2 reside in the smaller of my 2 tanks so they're alone with a few invertebrates and they're getting along well. Pair 1 reside with a tomini tang, a royal gramma and a shark nose goby..this is where the interesting behavior is. Pair 1 has swam together occasionally, but my tomini, who has never been aggressive in the 2 plus years that I've had him, is flaring up his fins and was going after the female black snowflake a bit, (nothing major, no fin damage or anything). But the interesting thing I've noticed is that the tang is constantly swimming between the clowns in what looks to me like an attempt to separate the 2. Makes me wonder what this behavior is about and whether or not my tang has a natural instinctive desire to prevent pair 1 from bonding? Anyway I thought this was interesting and I wanted to know if anyone has ever added a new clown to their tank and noticed any tank members trying to prevent the clowns from pairing up?
