Identify this black clownfish?

[elegance coral]

EC
You got high standard.

Yes sir, as we all should. Mother nature gets it right, so we know it can be done. We just need to keep at it until we figure out how she does it. Until then, we'll continue to produce an inferior fish.

Other than the Jaw, can you give further critics regarding my fish. i will not be offended.

I'm not trying to say the fish is bad. It's just your typical captive bred fish. That's all. Deformities are common in captive bred fish.

But, it you look closely you will see that the mouth look abnormal due to the fact that it is open at the time the picture was snapped, which cause it not to look smooth. You can see clearly that this is the case by the space between the two lips and the angle of the lower jaws to the rest of the body. There is no protruding jaw in real life. What you see is just an artifact of the photo.

No sir. I do not agree with that at all. The fish looks deformed, because it is deformed. This is not a result of the camera angle, or the way the fish is holding its mouth. That is a captive bred fish with the common deformities found in captive bred fish. It is not a wild caught fish where such deformities would be extremely rare. Unfortunately, at this point, it would be unrealistic to expect a captive bred fish to exhibit the flawless detail found in wild fish. The fish above is no exception to this. It is deformed just like 99.9999% of the other captive bred fish.


Peace
EC

 

[elegance coral]

Angel of which the picture was taken will often give false look to a clown.

I agree with this. That's not what's taking place in the pic you posted of the percula though. The fish is clearly deformed and the pic shows it.

Here's a pic of a pair I have. In the first pic, the female doesn't seem deformed.

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However, the profile pic clearly shows the deformed jaw. The same type of profile shot that shows the same type of deformity in the pic you posted.

 

[hawgdawg]

My dog gave birth to a couple of puppies, one of which has a deformed jaw. What should I do?

 

[hawgdawg]

According to most here, I should cull it.

 

[elegance coral]

My dog gave birth to a couple of puppies, one of which has a deformed jaw. What should I do?

Stop breeding dogs.

 

[hawgdawg]

Why have you not culled the deformed fish that you have?

 

[hawgdawg]

The point I'm trying to make is that we all know that most cb fish are not perfect, but they are a far better option than taking a fish from the wild. So you have a perfect wild caught perc, you brag to all your buddies " look at my perfect wild caught perc", big deal. You just contributed to to the destruction of our environment for your own selfish pleasure. If you want to see a perfect perc, buy yourself a ticket to a South Pacific island and go diving. There is absolutely no reason to purchase a wild caught clownfish in this hobby, other than for your own selfish reasons. And if you don't like the fish because it has a deformity, the answer is simple, don't freakin buy it. I'm sure that would put all these sub standard breeders out of business really quickly. And you guys should stop beating down on other people's fish just cause yours is better.

Any newbie to the hobby will get the impression from this thread that he or she needs to get a wild caught fish or nothing at all. That's ridiculous.

 

[phender]

The point I'm trying to make is that we all know that most cb fish are not perfect, but they are a far better option than taking a fish from the wild. So you have a perfect wild caught perc, you brag to all your buddies " look at my perfect wild caught perc", big deal. You just contributed to to the destruction of our environment for your own selfish pleasure. If you want to see a perfect perc, buy yourself a ticket to a South Pacific island and go diving. There is absolutely no reason to purchase a wild caught clownfish in this hobby, other than for your own selfish reasons. And if you don't like the fish because it has a deformity, the answer is simple, don't freakin buy it. I'm sure that would put all these sub standard breeders out of business really quickly. And you guys should stop beating down on other people's fish just cause yours is better.

The point of most of this thread is not that WC are better than CB. Its that breeders can produce CB clowns without any defects (without having to cull anything) if they know what they are doing and were more concerned with turning out a good product than their profit margins. We can (I have) produced CB clowns that are perfect. I don't buy deformed clowns, but people who don't know any better or don't care, keep the breeders in business, with no motivation to improve their husbandry. We are not bagging on people's fish. We are basically talking about the standard of what a good captive bred fish should meet.

One of the problems with designer clown breeding is what if you get a fish with a great pattern, but slight environmentally caused deformities. Personally, I would keep it and breed it to see if it would throw its pattern since it shouldn't pass on the deformities.

Unfortunately, if this is a big portion of your livelihood and you have 100 clowns that have good pattern but slight deformities, do you go ahead and sell them to an uneducated, unknowing public, or do you do what I think is the right thing and use them to fertilize your plants.

Comparing clowns to dogs is a bit silly. But to answer your question, I would keep the dog for myself and not pass it on to anyone else. If the jaw was going to cause the dog pain for the rest of its life, I would try to have it repaired. If it could not be repaired, I would euthanize the dog. FWIW, I bred a puppy that suffered slight brain damage at birth. I kept the dog its entire life, even though a couple different people offered me $1000 for it.

 

[elegance coral]

The point I'm trying to make is that we all know that most cb fish are not perfect,

I wish that were true, but it's not. Most people do not know that CB clowns are deformed, and don't know what to look for.

but they are a far better option than taking a fish from the wild.

I agree. The point here is that if we are going to breed these fish (or any animal) we should strive to produce the healthiest fish possible. If we are producing fish with obvious deformities, it should be viewed as a huge red flag letting us know we're doing something wrong.

So you have a perfect wild caught perc, you brag to all your buddies " look at my perfect wild caught perc", big deal.

Who's bragging about their perfect wild caught perc? The first link I provided as an example of what we should be striving for wasn't even my fish, and I pointed out that fact. I did go on to post pic's of my WC fish, but I also posted pic's of my deformed CB fish. I don't see how that, or anything said in this thread, can be viewed as bragging.

You just contributed to to the destruction of our environment for your own selfish pleasure.

Are perculas or any other anemonefish endangered? How is the collection of these fish contributing to the destruction of our environment?

You and I both live here in Florida. We have bass fishermen that come here from all over. Are we running out of bass? Are bass fishermen destroying our environment? No. Our government makes lots of money off of bass fishing. A portion of that money goes into maintaining our water ways, and enforcing laws that insure we'll have bass for generations to come.

There is no reason for the collection of wild clown fish to destroy our environment. It is a natural resource not unlike any other. It simply needs to be controlled like we do with the collection of any other fish, like tuna, trout, bass, salmon, flounder............

And you guys should stop beating down on other people's fish just cause yours is better.

No one in this thread has been "beating down on other people's fish".

People come here to learn. There is a difference between a deformed clown and one that is not. This difference has been pointed out in this thread so that people can learn. This difference has not been pointed out in an attempt to beat down someone's fish, or to brag.

Any newbie to the hobby will get the impression from this thread that he or she needs to get a wild caught fish or nothing at all. That's ridiculous.

Yesterday, just yesterday, I lost the female CB perc shown in the video below. I had her for roughly five years. Her deformities weren't drastic, but they were still obvious to me. Why did I lose her so young?????? She was full of eggs when she died, and she was kept in a system with other spawning clowns that are doing fine. I have WC clowns that have been with me for well over a decade. One of them is still spawning. Something caused this fish to die prematurely. She was in the prime of her life, and should not have died so young.:furious: Could her death have been brought on by some unseen defect???? I can't prove it, but that sure seems logical to me. I guess we should not be surprised when a deformed animal doesn't live out it's natural life span.

The truth is the truth, if we like it or not. If a newbie knows the truth, and would rather buy a wild fish, then so be it. Maybe breeders would work harder to produce fish without these physical problems if their sales went down because of them.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ugVktUZV-bE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[OrionN]

I learned a lot from this thread. This is my first try at breeding clowns. I bough 8 baby clowns from Rod 8 years ago sold 6 and only keep two. The female jumped out a few weeks ago. Fortunately, I got a few babies from this pair and will try to keep on breeding Onyx clown fish. I try to improve my technique all the time. Reading about it is one thing but there are things that one cannot learn just by reading. I hope to be like Phil where I can produce perfect babies in the future. The young babies that I have now do have some deformities, but not a lot. They are a lot better than what I see as tank breed clowns foe sale from ORA or SA.

In the near future I will have a fish room with dedicate system to breed clowns and will only raise a small number at a time to see if I can optimize the result. I am still learning raising clowns at this time. Will see what the future hold.

 

[hawgdawg]

Elegance, just a couple of things before I check out. Your bass analogy is not a good one since bass is predominantly a catch and release fishery, unlike clownfish that are removed from their natural environment for good. Also, the countries from which clownfish come from are not fortunate enough to have conservation laws in place like we do. There are no limits of how many clownfish you can take in many of these countries, meaning that our greedy demand for these creatures will ultimately be their demise.

A more appropriate analogy would be redfish. Back the in 80s when there was the blackened redfish craze, the redfish stock became so overfished that it was in the brink of collapse.

We are not trying to be Mother Nature in the breeding world, in fact, we are trying to do the things that Mother Nature does not do well, the reason why you can have virtually 100 percent survival from a batch of clownfish, unlike the dismal survivals in the wild. Cb fish are not meant to be placed back in the wild, they are meant to stay in their glass box for their entire lives. Mother Nature does not have to worry about deformities being introduced in the wild.

Sorry about your fish loss, but now you are speculating that it died because it was a captive bred fish? Boy, is that a stretch or what? How many perfect wild caught perculas have you lost in the first week to brook etc?

You can bash breeders all you want, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you don't like it, don't buy it. All these people that come on here showing their beautiful fish just to have the clownfish police knit pick everything about it. It is still a beautiful fish, just be glad that the person that digs his cool deformed clownfish did not buy a wild caught one. I'm out!

 

[hawgdawg]

Phender , I agree with most of what you said, but the bottom line is that economics will dictate which fish leave the hatchery. For example, the breeder raises a batch of Percs, lets say 2000 fish. The deformities are not obvious until these fish are older, probably 5 months old or so. At that point, he realizes that 60 percent of the fish show some form of obvious deformities, thing like underbites, stubby body, deformed gill plates, etc. he decides to cull those. Of the 40 percent left, elegance coral picks them apart and decides that only 50 of those fish are sellable. So the breeders needs to either sell them for 500 bucks a pop, or close shop while his losses are still low.

Instead of killing the poor little memos, why don't we just price them according to their quality? Underbites cost less than no underbites, round faces more than square faces and so on. With a price structure based on quality, the breeder will determine what makes sense to keep around and what needs to be culled, and it would all be dependent ultimately on the consumers taste, which is really what it's all about.

As noble as the idea of selling only perfect fish might sound, you just can't fight the laws of economics. Remember, there are people that make a living doing this.

 

[phender]

You seem to be under the assumption that CB fish will inherently have some deformities. That is simply not case. C-Quest (the original one) used to produce fish without deformities. The color sucked, but that was because the proper color ingredients hadn't been developed. ORA used to produce nicely shaped clowns before they changed hands. Tropic Marine produced nice fish (first to breed and sell the black ocellaris). It's not because they were culling all their deformed fish. It is because their husbandry practices were good enough where they didn't have many, if any at all.

The change seemed to happen when someone started marketing their under barred clowns(which is an environmental thing as well). Once hatcheries realized that people would buy clowns that weren't marked right, they started selling the facial deformities and people bought those too. Now they don't seem to care. Breeding practices seem to have degraded to the point where facial deformities seem to be the norm now rather than the exception.

Minh, you will get it right. I will take a couple batches, but the sad thing is that it not that hard. Maybe they need to go back to feeding the rotifers live phyto instead of the frozen pastes. Maybe you need to do more water changes or keep the clowns in smaller batches, maybe go back to live baby brine shrimp as a food after rotifers (I know a lot of people skip that now), maybe the commercial "fish chow" that they use is not that good for clowns. I don't know. The lady in Hawaii who raises Latz is pretty good at it and Morgman, who used to be on this site and had a huge set up in his garage, was very good at it too. I have seen SA being lumped in with ORA, but the ones I have seen from them that make it out to the West Coast seem to be very good as well. There was a guy (Oama) who used to work for ORA in the "old days". He hasn't posted for a couple years but maybe you could find him and see if he knows what cost cutting measures were introduced that caused the quality to decline. Ediaz used to work at C-quest and had his own hatchery but I don't think he is on the board much anymore either.

There are people making a living (big businesses) running puppy mills too. It doesn't make it right and it doesn't mean I am going to stop voicing my concerns.

 

[OrionN]

If I breed fish and got a fish like the picture posted by the OP, I certainly not happy about it, and would not consider it as a premium fish.
My baby fish I initially though as not having deformity, was pointed out by EC and phender as having some mouth deformity. I keep CB clownfish and anemone for a very long time, but only recently try to breed them. If it can be done, which I think it can, I will breed perfectly shape clownfish.
My ego is not so fragile as to crumble with some critic like this.

 

[G4546]

We are not trying to be Mother Nature in the breeding world, in fact, we are trying to do the things that Mother Nature does not do well

I assume from this statement you did not view the post from E.C. regarding the WC Picasso w/ photo? You're saying we are not trying to achieve that type of specimen with captive breeding programs? Could you please give an example of what Mother Nature does not do well? (I've seen the correlation of your dog to clownfish, let's avoid that if all possible)

Cheers!

 

[G4546]

I learned a lot from this thread.

:thumbsup::thumbsup: likewise Minh!

 

[elegance coral]

If it can be done, which I think it can, I will breed perfectly shape clownfish.
My ego is not so fragile as to crumble with some critic like this.

I have absolutely no doubt that you will work your hardest to produce the best quality fish you can. I'm sure you will have a very high quality product. When you get ready to start shipping out, look me up. I may be able to make some connection for you.:thumbsup:

I'm glad I didn't step on your ego. That surely was not my intention.:beer:

Peace
EC

 

[hawgdawg]

G4546

Last I checked, 99percent of these designer clownfish are not manufactured by Mother Nature, and Mother Nature only guarantees the survival of less than 1 percent of a clownfish brood. Need I say more?

 

[Winwood]

Just assign someone to be the head of the American Clown Fish Association of the ACFA and let them set the breed standard.

 

[OrionN]

OrionN's Avatar

Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Costal Texas
Posts: 7,810

pointer for raising perfectly shape clowns
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.