Identify this black clownfish?

[Reef*freak]

I agree we need to try more thing me as a small breeder I went back try BBS a lot of people say they don't do any thing but it give me good results .and many many water changes here's one of my CB clown

 

[phender]

OrionN's Avatar
Phil,
What were the steps that you took that enable you to raise perfectly looking clowns? I think I may have find the food source that will give them good coloring. I just need to see what kind of technique needed. How much water change? How small of a number to keep them? How large of a rearing tank?
Having information, pointers from an expert who have done it like you will save me a lot of heart aches, time and money.

Hi Minh,
I pretty much followed the guidelines in Martin Moe's book "Marine Aquarium Handbook - Beginner to Breeder".
It has been a while, but here is what I remember.
* I used a 10 gal tank with a black plastic around the outside, with a flap cut for a window and white paper under the bottom to better see the babies. There was a 25 watt submersible heater with the light taped over and a course airstone with just a trickle a air coming out. The larvae should be able to swim against the current caused by the airstone. No filter at all.
* 5 gallons of water from the parent tank was taken out for the rearing tank during the process of collecting the babies. I would add another gallon per day from the parent tank until there was about 8 gallons in the tank. Its probably a good idea to run the brood tank water through a coffee filter to remove plankton from the parent tank. I didn't and one time ended up with a bunch of medusas in my rearing tank. I changed 2 gallons of water every other day, siphoning water and detritus off the bottom with a ridged tube connected to airline tubing. New water was always taken from the parent tank. If your parent tank water is high in nitrates, you might want to try aged new water or half and half.
* I used the flashlight/scoop method to collect the babies, so I usually was only able to collect around 100 from each batch. The one time I was able to place a tile with eggs on it in the rearing tank, I was amazed by how many babies I had when they hatched.
* I fed the rotifers with live Nannochloropsis algae cultures. I am not against the new frozen algae concentrates, they just weren't around when I started. I have used them since then with no difference in results. Every once in a while I would put a couple of drops of Selcon in with the rotifers for an hour before straining the rotifers and feeding them to the babies.
* I didn't feed the babies until the next morning. At that time I would also add just enough green water to give the white paper a slight green tint. If you are not culturing your own green water, I found that DT's live phytoplankton worked well. The green water helps keep the rotifers alive and nutritious and helps reduce the waste produced by the babies and the rotifers.
*I feed rotifers for the first 10 days. (I found that most of the time the babies will live for about 2 days whether they feed or not)
*After the third day I would start to add newly hatched baby San Francisco strain brine shrimp(they are smaller than the Salt Lake strain). The shrimp need to be harvested and fed to the babies within an hour of them hatching to provide the smallest size and the highest nutrition profile. That meant I alway had to have a batch of brine shrimp eggs ready to hatch everyday.
* Once the babies started to get color I started to feed them non living food and weaned them off of the brine shrimp. I would pulverize flake food with a mortar, feed frozen and/or freeze dried Cyclop-eeze, golden pearls and in the early days a food made by Harbor Branch (I think) called Vibra-Gro. It was the first food with astaxanthin and made all the difference in the color of the baby clowns. Retailers at the time could not believe that my fish were CB because of their color. At that time all the commercial CB fish were very pale orange(This was early 1990's). They later sold out to Red Sea and it was still good, but when it was sold again to ORA it seemed to not be as good.
* Once I started feeding non-living foods I started changing 1 gallon of water everyday and tried very hard to get all the uneaten food off the bottom of the tank, sometimes using the hard airline tube as a scraper(I heated and flattened the end of the tube a little). Sometimes I would use a credit card.
* When they started to get their second stripe, I would add a large, aged sponge filter and a few pieces of PVC pipe to the tank to provide some hiding places. I still changed 1 gallon of water everyday. Once you get them through this stage without any deformities, you are good. That doesn't mean you won't notice imperfections when they get bigger, but they were formed before this point.
* About the time they started to get their 3rd stripe I would move them to a larger tank with a HOB filter and a sponge filter with a small powerhead.
* In my experience, usually there would be a handful of fish that would grow faster than the others. If they are not removed the other babies wouldn't grow much. Once you remove the bigger fish another handful of babies would grow to take their place. So I usually had two grow out tanks(20-40 gallons). One for the little guys and one for the ones that outgrew the little guys tank. By the time they outgrew the second tank, they were ready for sale.

I hope that helps. If you read this and think, "That is exactly what I am doing and I still get deformities and misbars" I would check your parent tanks for high nitrate levels, feed your parent fish better food (high quality frozen foods instead of flakes/pellets or make your own), change your brand of algae paste, change the dry food that you feed and/or step up your water changes. If that fails, try something else. You don't have to settle for deformities.

Good luck.

 

[OrionN]

Thanks Phil