Pink Skunk harem

[E.J. Coral]

I know that conventional wisdom states that one should only keep one pair of clowns per aquarium, but I have decided to jump off the deep-end and try to make a clown family.

Right now I have a 48x30x17.5 aquarium. It is currently home to a pair of breeding pink skunks, an 18" purple gigantea (established), and a newly aquired 7" blue gigantea. Furthermore, I am in the market for another large gigantea. I would like to have 6+ skunks in the tank .... mostly because I want all of the anemones to be hosting, as I believe that it is integral to the health of the anemones.

My question is how to establish the family. As i see it I have three options:
1. Add four juvies to the tank.
2. Sell my current skunks and buy a new group of juvies. ( I don't want to, because regularly breeding skunks are hard to come by!)
3. Raise a batch of eggs from the current pair, and add them back when they are big enough.

What do you guys think?

 

[kimsie]

Oh Oh! I think number 3! I guess I'm just guessing it would be your best bet of having it successfully be done.

I would love to see it done - and that tank would be beautiful!!!

Good luck!

 

[bugbdon]

kind of off the topic, but .....are gigantea's natural hosts for pink skunks? i'm intrested in getting a pair of pink skunks in the future and i'm trying to plan out a tank for them

 

[elegance coral]

I think you should raise a batch of babies and put some of them in the tank. I would get the third Gigantea first. The stress should be lower with more hosts to choose from. I have 3 large Saddle Backs that live happily together. They live in a tank with no host at the moment. I tried introducing them to a Haddoni, but they started fighting over it. I plan on getting two more Haddonis and trying it again.
Here they are before the hoedown in the Haddoni started.

 

[Flighty]

With skunks and a large anemone I would say just add some juvis (with sufficient QT first of course). We breed our pair of skunks and returned a bunch of the grown out babies to the tank. There is always a lot of activity, but no major aggression. One of the juvis is now larger than the male of the pair with no problems. The pair keep all of the babies out of the anemone (10 inch magnifica) during the day, but at night at least 10 of them pile into it.

In our basement tank we have several baby skunks living with some percs and they have all stayed smaller than the others for some reason. Possibly the increased aggression of the percs is keeping them more juviish, but I'm not sure.

I personally would do more than 4 in your setup, but I like the more natural looking chaos of the interaction of a lot of clowns in big anemones. It has not effected the size or regularity of our pair's spawning (every 12-13 days a clutch of ~1200 eggs is laid like clockwork)

I would be more cautious about adding another gigantea, than about the clowns. I hope you consider QTing a new addition just in case.

 

[adtravels]

I would add several very small juvies to the existing pair in the tank, make sure the nem is large, this would be my first option, it takes little time to do.