Our ocellaris lost her mate and were given a maroon

yourclownfishisfine · Dec 25, 2022

Thanks in advance for any insight! Our female ocellaris lost her mate in a move, we got them as a mated pair and there wasn’t much aggression when they paired in our tank. We were trying to get rid of our pistol goby pair and a friend offered to give us one of his small maroons. I asked all the usual maroon questions and our friend said that he hadn’t really grown at all in over a year and is one of the most docile fish he’s ever had. He was absolutely correct- this little guy is adorable and not aggressive at all. There was some initial aggression from our female, but they were swimming together within a few days! Only thing is that the maroon spends almost all of his time up in the back corner of the tank. The female will even go try to swim with him, she doesn’t even nip anymore, and sometimes he will come out and swim with her for a few minutes, but he always goes right back to the corner. We recently added a nem and the female has started to host and will even try to lead the male to the nem, but he always ends up going right back to the corner.

it kind of seems like it could be a flow issue for the maroon, but we can’t turn it down anymore in our setup, but I wasn’t sure if anyone has some insight into this?

blaxsun · Dec 25, 2022

I've heard that maroons can be jerks, so that's nice to hear they're getting along so swimmingly. Captive bred clownfish can sometimes take a while to figure the whole "anemone" thing out, so if he didn't have any in his previous tank he probably doesn't get it yet (even though the female is leading him to water, so to speak).

The clownfish do seem to be swimming around quite well, so I don't think the flow is overly powerful. From what I could observe with the anemone the flow seems to come in bursts rather than ripples or waves - so that might be something you could look at (again, I'd need more details on your setup).

Nice plump fish!