22 clowns; 2 separate species, 12 months
 

Well, with much trepidation I post the results of my clown fish experiment. After reading and studying Moberts long lived stickied thread 1.5 years ago I decided to repeat the process in a slightly tweaked fashion. I began a new tank to house my experiment. I had a custom built 80 gallon cube built with LED lights to start. The only other fish in the tank, besides the clowns, would be 7 adult chromis. After cycling the tank and introducing the chromis for a few weeks, I special ordered a juvenile pair of spotcinctus clowns. I let the spots have the run of the tank for around 2 weeks and then I order my 20 b & w juvenile occe's. You'll clearly see the difference in size of the fish over the last year, especially with the dominant spots. The all started out the same size, but then the spots took off over time.
Please make no mistake. I don't condone doing this. I spent hundreds of hours studying ways to have the best possible outcome from it and avoid bullying and death of the clowns. I still look at this very much as an experiment with perhaps a different outcome still around the corner. But I hadn't ever heard of anyone else succeeding in this so I'd thought I'd try it out. Please fill free to ask all the questions you want. I'll do my best to answer them. Maybe we can even get this thread stickied as well for people to better follow the progress. Anyways, enjoy.
I'll post as many pictures with my crappy camera as I can.

first pics of b & w occe's

more pics

Alright. Fast forward a year. These were taken yesterday. A couple of things have changed with the tank, namely, I lost lots of anemone's using LED's. I've switched to 250 w MH's and will probably back down again to a single 175 MH bulb on the tank. Just too much light for my nems. Anyways. You'll really be able to see the difference between the 1 year old fish now.

The spotcinctus control all of the BTA's. I introduced a small purple LTA 6 months ago and the spots leave it alone, so now the occe's all sleep together in it every night. I'll try to get a sleeping pic of them at some point.

The larger, lighter spotcinctus is the female, the slightly smaller, darker spotcinctus is the male.

Did any clowns formed into a pair?
I always wanted to try this. I have a 270g tank in the work

the dominant spotcintus paired up, no other clowns that I can see so far have.

At what age do ocellaris typically turn female / pair up?

from my understanding it only takes a few months for pairs to form and sexes to be established.

This is actually typical. In any population, the dominant will turn female, next one male. The rest will often stay juvenile and not select a sex. Only if one of the pair dies or goes missing will another change sex.

Given enough room and other resources, they don't fight.

Jeff

Yup. I agree. There have been plenty of cases shown where this is accomplished. I just wanted to try doing this with two separate species and see if it could be accomplished. So far, so good. :strange:

I'm curious about your LED's. Are you sure it was the lights that killed your anemone's? What were you using? Just curious because I use LED's, for the last 2 years almost the whole time with the exception of the winter months for a MH swap for heat reasons, and my anemone's all do fine.

Nice experiment. Your tank looks great. Thanks for sharing.

This is awesome!!!!!!

I used non dimming PAR 38 LED bulbs from nanotuners with 40 degree optics and fried em. I know it was my LED's because as soon as I switched over to MH's the anemone's started to grow better. Still lots of improvement with them needed. What type of LED's are you using? I would like to go back to LED's I'm just gun shy now.

I made mine. Reefledlights.com I have a mertens, sebae, gig, and RBTA. All love the lights. Mine are about half and half, older XRE and newer XPE and XPG's. Non-dimmable. I also fried a few corals when I first switched, a bit of a learning curve. I've never tried the PAR lamps, but I did get one for a fuge that worked very good for growing cheato.

Also, I don't use any optics. I don't think you need them, my tank is 29" tall and can grow in the sand.

+1, no optics needed and my LEDs are doing well for me too.

Congrats on the success hypnoj, I hope they continue to get along. Has it been difficult to maintain water quality with so many fish?

No it hasn't. I attribute that to biopellets. I feed every other day. I change the water once every 6 months. I run a biopellet reactor, midsize refugium full of cheato, and run a reactor with carbon. So far so good. I think as long as I feed lightly, it's ok. I only feed the nems once or twice a month.

great experiment I think you are doing great for the community with this research

I hope things work out for you. I tried a group of 10 a while back, but they started fighting and then got clownfish disease somehow and ended up all dieing. Did you find 20 to be a magic number or something?

thank you :)

I think it's the larger more aggressive Spotcintus clowns that keep the fighting among the Occe's to a minimum. This was planned. The number 20 is important because I wanted enough Occe's in the tank to spread the aggression from the dominant Spots around, so not any particular one could get picked on (schooling effect).

I'm assuming something like Clarki's, Cinnamon's, Maroon's or Tomato's would probably be too aggressive, or had you considered those over the Spotcintus? I'm not fully aware of how aggressive Spotcintus get.

Also, I'm assuming a grown up pair of Spotcintus would have been too aggressive as well initially?

Your thinking is exactly what mine was. I too felt that Cinnamon's, Maroon's or Tomato's would be too aggressive. I researched out the temperament of bicinctus clowns (spotcinctus are hybrids of these) and found them to be more aggressive then percs/occe's and less aggressive then the above named species. Any yes, I felt that if I had added the occe's (which absolutely have to be juveniles and small) to a tank with a large dominant pair, that the pair would have tore through them. I made sure that my small young spot's were paired up well and good and then as soon as I was confident, I added the juvi occe's. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets when I added the occe's, because some of them were quite large and almost as big as the spots. But domination from the spots had already begun and they began keeping the occe's from reaching sexual maturity right off the bat.

I wonder what other types would be on a similar aggression level as bicinctus/spot's? I never see them around where I live ever.