A couple of clowns

[Brieninsac]

I bought my first two fish today, a couple of Ocellaris Clowns. They're juveniles that I got from my LFS. My wife fell in love with them on the ride home. They look so tiny in my 73gal. tank.

A couple of questions, I have Kessil a360 lights, what intensity and hours a day should I be using? How can you tell the sex, one is a little darker on the top then the other? Since these are the first two fish in the tank I'm hoping they're going to make it. Is there a general rule of thumb when a fish makes it so long they're likely to survive?

 

[Dkuhlmann]

I'll answer the question pertaining to sex of your clowns.

They are all born sexless/male until one dominate fish turns female. The female will continue to grow much larger than the male of the pair. You will see dominance and submission "dancing" per se, where the male will do a little shudder when submitting to the female. So there is no way to tell based on different coloration or shading

Keep them fed with quality mix of foods. NLS .5mm pellets, mysis shrimp and one of the frozen mixes like LRS are always good. You can also feed them brine shrimp but they aren't as nutritious as the others.

Make sure you do get the .5mm NLS pellets and not the 1mm as the 1mm is much to large for them to eat at this time. I feed mostly pellets and give them either the frozen mysis or LRS once a day or every other day but twice daily on the pellets.

Check the lighting forum for further help on your lighting question. Usually lights cycles are used 12 hours a day just line natural daylight for the most part. I use T5 and mine turn on at 8am then at 9am ramp up to full then at 5pm ramp down and then off at 8pm. This is a 4 bulb T5.

Keep your water parameters stable and your fish fed good quality food and they should do just fine.

 

[Brieninsac]

Awesome, thanks! I'm feeding them NLS Thera+a .5mm but will get some frozen shrimp too. They didn't eat much this morning, which is understandable. They seem to be getting more comfortable in the tank exploring more.

 

[lancemusic91]

I use kessil lighting as well.one thing I can say is that led lights are a lot brighter than they appear visually.depending on corals in the tank and how they respond would dictate lighting cycles.I run mine for eight hours a day with good results.the highest I ramp mine up to is 65% with good results.I have lps and soft corals.sps would most likely require more.