pair of two female clowns?

[seleeene]

Hi all,

I'm having trouble identifying the true sex of my ocellaris clowns in my 29g biocube. I've had an orange ocellaris clown for almost 10 years which was kept singly for the first 5 years (assuming it was female for that time). Then, 5 years ago I bought a much smaller black ocellaris clown (assuming it would remain male) that paired with the larger orange clown. The orange clown remained larger and more dominant/aggressive and the black clown remained smaller/submissive for 3 years after the initial pairing UNTIL the smaller black clown grew 3x its size and is now the more dominate/aggressive clown. The previously assumed female orange clwon now only displays submissive behaviour even though it was the dominate fish. This behaviour change and size difference began when I had to move from a 8gal --> 14 gal after my tank accidentally fell on the floor and was literally in pieces. The fish were probably electrically shocked from the equipment getting wet before they were rescued.

My question is, do I have a pair of two sexually mature females but only one displays female behaviour? Or is it possible for a mature female clown to revert back to a male? I've never heard of the latter being possible so I'm wondering what everyone has to say about this.

Many Thanks! :hmm5:

Photo 1 from 2008:


Photo 2 from 2016:

 

[JVan82]

Interesting... my understanding while very limited, is that something unknown makes them turn to female, so I'm wondering if your orange clown was ever a female? Now given the 3 yes together where she exhibited dominant behavior, would make sense she was the dominate female. Now question is have they switched? I'm unsure if that's possible, but again my limited understanding is if they're both females they'd fight. Interested in someone shedding some more light on this.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

[oahureefer]

Conventional wisedom is it's a one way trip unsexed to male to female. Ocellaris are known to tolerate other females so it is possible that you now have 2 females. They may have never actually paired and thereby when the opportunity came about (new environment/new tank) the "male" changed to female.

 

[seleeene]

I didn't know they could be tolerant of other females. I was sure they paired up since the two clowns are always swim together in the tank and sleep in the same area. Although, the orange clown likes to swim in my torch coral while the black one nips at my brain coral and they've clearly never laid any eggs.

 

[phender]

Here is my guess, based on my understanding of clown transformation.

Your orange clown was never a female. The small 8 gal tank you had the fish in never allowed for the hormone levels required to make the transformation into female. Because of the small tank and its size advantage over the black clown the orange clown was able to keep the black one from developing any functional sex.

Once you moved them to a larger tank with different territories all bets were off and the more aggressive clown (the black one) filled the role that the orange one too slow to move into.

So now the question is, will they finally become a breeding pair?

 

[ThRoewer]

Both look like males to me.
Also, the sex change from male to female is a one way trip. In general, two females will rather kill each other rather than one showing submission.
And then there is the high probability that the black Darwin clowns are a different species than the regular ocellaris. At a minimum they are a sub-species.

 

[pfan151]

I thought I read about ORA doing an experiment succesfully getting clowns to turn from male to female and then back to male again but I could be remembering wrong. Couldn't find the article googling.

 

[Irishdolphin]

....And then there is the high probability that the black Darwin clowns are a different species than the regular ocellaris. At a minimum they are a sub-species.

What impact does this have? Does it mean that they wouldn't trigger the conversion to female as they are different / sub species?

 

[phender]

What impact does this have? Does it mean that they wouldn't trigger the conversion to female as they are different / sub species?

I don't think it would be a problem. I have seen quite a few Black x Orange Ocellaris breeding pairs.

 

[ThRoewer]

I thought I read about ORA doing an experiment succesfully getting clowns to turn from male to female and then back to male again but I could be remembering wrong. Couldn't find the article googling.

I would not discount the possibility under lab conditions. It works with Pseudochromis, Hawkfish and several others. Though generally the opposite than normal direction of sex change takes significantly longer.
Generally two female clownfish will fight to the death and one will be dead within days or even hours - long before she could revert back to male.

 

[seleeene]

Thank you for your input everyone. I've been puzzled by this situation for awhile now and your replies are insightful.

There is a chance that my original orange clown never became female since the tank was so small. However, both clowns have played the dominant role exclusively (to the point of biting my hands while cleaning the tank) and the submissive role exclusively (since they submit to the other clown by frequently quivering in their presence and stopped caring about my hands during tank maintenance).

I'd be interested in reading that ORA article if anyone finds it.

 

[seleeene]

Actually I just found this article stating that an environment causing depletion of estrogen may result in transition from female to male in clarkiis :

"This result strongly suggests that germ cells with bipotentiality or spermatogonial cells remain in the functional ovaries of anemonefish following sex change from functional males to functional females. There is a possibility that estrogen depletion due to AI treatment might have caused the opposite-directional sex change from functional female to male in the anemonefish."

http://https://zoologicalletters.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40851-015-0027-y

perhaps the sudden growth of the black clownfish was enough to induce a sex reversal in the orange clown, but slow enough so that no fighting occurred?