Fishboy42
Premium Member
We came in one morning last week to find that a clownfish had experienced a run-in with an urchin. The pair of clowns has been living in a 30g tank with a single urchin for several months, and they frequently bump into and irritate it, but I've never seen anything like this!
The Urchin:
It's painful to look at:
I was able to pull out most of the spine, but I am fairly certain that some of it remains inside the fish. The fish never really seemed to mind though and was acting normally the whole time. She still eats well and is actually starting to clean a nesting site...
The interesting thing is that the clown that did this comes from a set of parents that produce "jumpy" fish. When we are collecting their offspring for sale or moving tanks, they commonly jump out of the tank (we even had a customer ask not to send the "jumpy" ones anymore, as he had noticed a difference in the behavior of his different shipments--we don't raise too many from this pair anymore
).
Uniclown's sister "Miss-Bar," my mom's misbar clownfish, is also the offspring of this pair--she tried to attack us and ended-up jumping out of a top-rack tank onto the floor last week when were were working in it (I put her back in and she looks fine -- laid another nest on-schedule yesterday). Must run in the family!
The Urchin:
It's painful to look at:
I was able to pull out most of the spine, but I am fairly certain that some of it remains inside the fish. The fish never really seemed to mind though and was acting normally the whole time. She still eats well and is actually starting to clean a nesting site...
The interesting thing is that the clown that did this comes from a set of parents that produce "jumpy" fish. When we are collecting their offspring for sale or moving tanks, they commonly jump out of the tank (we even had a customer ask not to send the "jumpy" ones anymore, as he had noticed a difference in the behavior of his different shipments--we don't raise too many from this pair anymore
). Uniclown's sister "Miss-Bar," my mom's misbar clownfish, is also the offspring of this pair--she tried to attack us and ended-up jumping out of a top-rack tank onto the floor last week when were were working in it (I put her back in and she looks fine -- laid another nest on-schedule yesterday). Must run in the family!
