Freshwater & Saltwater Aquarium Fish Forum

My Clownfish Are Breeding

So last night was good and bad news. Bad news was one of my anemones got sucked into a power filter. bah. that was a mess to clean up. it wasn’t a rose anemone but still losing anything sucks.

anyways…a few weeks ago, I noticed one of the clownfish exhibiting breeding behaviors (the cleaning of rocks etc). Didn’t think much of it b/c people normally don’t have luck with their clownfish breeding and plus my pair was so new and also there were 6 other clownfish in the same tank. but just watching the tank, i noticed one of them fanning the rocks instead. so i looked closer and there they were! clownfish eggs! they must’ve been there for awhile since you can already see the lil’ eyes on each egg. Should hatch probably within the next 2-3 days is my guess.

unfortunately she happen to lay the eggs on a foundation rock so there’s no way for me to get to them w/o having to tear down the entire rock structure and there’s an anemone attached to it also. plus with a predatory mystery wrasse in there, i doubt there will be any survivors. but who knows….my giant anemone family (made up of 9 rose anemones) might provide them with some shelter afterall.

so how did i think this happen? Normally it takes awhile for 2 clownfish to pair up but maybe the way i chose them (one big, one medium and rest small) helped. Also maybe by having multiple clownfishes in there, it may have caused the 2 biggest to “mature” faster. who knows….

i tried to take a video with my phone but it came out with a weird extension that only Quicktime can play it. (not .qt or .mov) it has an extension of “.3g2”. not sure how to convert that into a youtube video but i’ll try using my actual camera tonite. see if i can get a video of it.