Juvenile ORA Maroon Clownfish

R

rffanat1c

New member
Does anyone know if ORA Gold Stripe Maroons are just getting worse overall or it is hit or miss? The reason I ask is my LFS ordered some from ORA and I went to go pick them up. Upon getting there, they were all around 1" but some were deep maroon and some were orange. Almost all of them had a huge underbite and their faces looked like quasimoto. I did not buy any of them and instead went to another LFS and picked up a wild caught GS Maroon.

I've never owned such a young juvenile maroon and my gut said to runaway based on their colors and faces. Just curious if anyone here has had any ORA juveniles that turned out normal looking from a suspect looking juvenile.
 
Inbreeding. I'm sure with a lot of inbreeding you'll get weird effects. I mean look at some of the humans out there in remote parts of the world were there is not a lot of natural selection. Some weird looking people. We'll call em kissing cousins. Plus some of the breeders are trying for designer fish in a hope to ask for a higher price, so I would expect strange physical traits to develop. Anyway, my 2 cents. Gsm clowns are some of my favorite. Beautiful fish.
 
ORA quality seems to go downhill very fast - that's what happens if Petco is your primary customer, quantity and price over quality.

Not sure if inbreeding is the actual cause here, I rather suspect they just don't care and neglect water quality and quality feeding. For Petco only the price and the supplied quantity count, but not necessarily the quality of fish. They likely think their customers won't know the difference anyway.

The other possibility could be that all the "good" fish go to Petco and the leftover garbage goes to the little stores - you want to please your biggest customer who buys for millions every week, who cares about the little LFS that orders fish for a few hundred once or twice a year...
 
I've heard that poor water quality and nutrition during the larval stage cause the issues more than inbreeding, but you can't help but think that some of the inbreeding causes deformations and weirdness. Also maybe a shorter life span over all.
 
Today DD put this sorry ORA excuse for a clownfish up for sale ...

... and had the chuzpe to call it Grade A :headwally:

... and ask $129.99 for it :debi:

ORA® Captive-Bred White Bonnet Head Clownfish (A Grade Single) (Amphiprion leucokranos)

attachment.php


It's a cull or feeder fish on my book :blown:
 
shifty51008 said:
Really, thats what they call a grade A. There is so many things wrong with that fish it isnt even funny.
Click to expand...

To me it's a grade somewhere closer to the end of the alphabet. Probably somewhere in the u, v or w region (there are still ways to do worse: flared gills, crooked spines,... for which I would reserve x, y & z)

It seems they follow the idea that, if you can't produce quality, just lower the standards and hope the customers are uneducated enough not to notice it.
They may also think that by flooding all Petco stores with this junk they will control what people think a clownfish should look like.

In fact ORA is actually causing serious damage to the cause of breeding fish for the hobby to reduce the takes from the wild.

One of the LFS here has switched to Sea & Reef clowns and dottybacks and they are significantly better than ORA (and usually also don't arrive even sicker than wild ones like I've seen with ORA)
 
it's really unfortunate that a site like LA/Divers Den would try to pass a deformed clown onto a customer instead of asking for credit from ORA...or at the very worst taking a loss. That's not ethical. Here's what a wild caught specimen looks like. It's like two different fishes. I understand the price difference is substantial but that's no excuse for putting out a product like that.
https://www.bluezooaquatics.com/productDetail.asp?did=1&pid=724&cid=14
 
Absolutely disgusting. The sad thing is that hobbyists -- especially newbies -- are starting to believe that this is what clownfish should look like.
 
addictedreefer said:
...The sad thing is that hobbyists -- especially newbies -- are starting to believe that this is what clownfish should look like.
Click to expand...

It almost looks like that this is the game plan Petco and ORA following.
And with LA/DD now being part of Petco you can already see their quality taking a nose-dive too.
Also customer service seems to be deteriorating.
 
rffanat1c said:
Thankfully I've got more than one LFS and one doesn't ever do ORA
Click to expand...

There are only 2 stores (excluding Petco) out of more than 30 in Los Angeles that I know of doing ORA orders. Those two do it primarily for coral supply. The rest either get tank raised fishes including clowns from Proaquatix, local breeders or whole sellers. Some still deal with Sustainable Aquatics. The biggest ORA and SA customer in my area seems to be PETCO.
Most stores are turned off by ORA's minimum order policy because their products sit for a long time to justify the expense of keeping them in stock. Just like most stores aren't going to tie up their funds on rare and expensive fish that take forever to sell. I am not saying it's right or wrong but just what I've been told by fish store owners, managers and employees over the years.
 
wow scary, hope people research items prior to making the investment (not monetarily but overall commitment for a fish you need to be responsible for), reminds me of puppy mills when a certain breed becomes trendy
 
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