white bonnet clown

[meladam]

We are back in the hobby after being out for aprox 5 yrs. Before we got out one of our friends who owned a fish store got in a very rare fish. I saw them and realized that I had never seen them before. We were told they were white bonnet clowns. We were able to take them home cuz we were going to try our hand at breeding. Needless to say we got out of the hobby before we got a chance to really try and breed them and gave them back to the guy who intially gave them to us.

My question for all of you is... Do any of you have/had a white bonnet clown??? Does anyone know where to get a pair??? I have seen a few sites out there who offer a price for them but say they do not have them in stock.

Any information on the white bonnets would be greatly appreicated.

Melinda

 

[reefman13]

Is this the clown you are talking about?

If so a similar species would be a Skunk Clownfish which looks like this:

 

[phender]

I had a white cap/bonnet clown for a while until I introduced an unquarentined fish and it got brookynella.

I have not seen any offer for sale in about a year. They tend to be very fragile shippers and don't live long for the stores or the wholesalers. Expensive fish + poor shipper usually means that someone along the line has to eat the money.

You might try emailing LiveAquaria.com. They are sometimes able to get their hands on some white caps.

FWIW: White caps in nature are often found paired with chrysopterus, orange skunk and other species of clowns instead of with other white caps. A purchased "pair" of white caps will often be two fish from two different anemones.

Here are a couple pics of mine.

 

[meladam]

Thanks phil I will try contacting them. Do you know if they have figured out if it is a true species or a hybrid? I know in Joyce Wilkinsons book she says they have not figured out if it was a hybrid, but that book was published in the 90s.

 

[tedr]

I did google the clown and found out that it is becoming scarce in the wild. Also, seems that there is some natural hybridization occurring in the wild. Doubt if we'll be seeing it in the hobby with any frequency.

 

[phender]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10815787#post10815787 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by meladam
Thanks phil I will try contacting them. Do you know if they have figured out if it is a true species or a hybrid? I know in Joyce Wilkinsons book she says they have not figured out if it was a hybrid, but that book was published in the 90s.

By the time Wilkerson wrote her book, most people realized that it was a hybrid. There was a pair that bred several times in the early 90's at the Stephen Birch Aquarium in LaJolla, Ca where only about 25% of the offspring actually looked like the parents.

That coupled with the wild counts in the 90's that found that more often than not breeding sized white caps weren't found paired with other white caps (even though their were others in the area), has most people thinking that they are a hybrid and not a species. The most likely parents of the original hybrid seem to be a Chrysopterus x sandaracinos (orange skunk) pair that were found laying fertile eggs in New Guinea. I heard a report that some of the eggs from this pair were taken and raised in a lab and were found to have produce white cap babies, but I can't find any back up documentation to that effect.

I have been trying to replicate that pairing in one of my tanks and though the fish have tolerated each other and sometimes even shared an anemone, there is no evidence that there was any pairing going on.

It is very possible that in the wild, they may be interbreeding themselves out of existance. Very few of the ones you see these days look much like the original holotype that was described in 1973.

 

[criccio]

Very interesting thread here... http://rareclownfish.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1754