The first retail offerings of Lightning Maroon Clownfish are only days or weeks away!

One of the two mystery destinations for today’s Lightning Maroon shipments is indeed Blue Zoo Aquatics.  If you’ve been paying attention to their newsletters, or to Reef Builders, this should come as no surprise.  Way back when starting this project, I made the unilateral offer that I would provide Blue Zoo Aquatics with the right of first refusal on these fish, and of course, they’ve accepted my offers.  I’m excited about the introduction of these fish to the masses.

Initially, the plan is to offer these F1 PNG Maroons in public, WYSIWYG auctions via eBay. Everyone will have a fair shot at them. This way the market truly sets the price..no one will be able to accuse us of “gouging”. We’re playing no favorites either; initially I we had discussed holding back the lesser quality fish (some of which normally would be culled) to provide them to commercial breeders in private auctions.  I suspect some fish will go surprisingly inexpensively, while others may fetch a handsome sum.  We have no set time limit as to when these auctions will occur, but with the F1 fish now close to a year old and getting quite large, as we start pulling from the group tank, we may have to move quickly to prevent murders etc. We had also planned to drop ship the fish directly from Duluth, MN, but that plan has changed too.

Like all good plans, the simple logistics of running what is probably the 2nd largest online retailer of marine livestock, combined with delays this winter, followed by the arrival of my new daughter, caused Mark Martin and I to reexamine some of our more detailed plans, ultimately streamlining things a bit for me and giving Blue Zoo a little more hands on control in fulfillment of winner’s purchases.  These first 5 will be our test scenario, and if it goes well, you can probably expect most or all of the Lightnings I sell to be offered through Blue Zoo Aquatics.

In the process of shooting photos and bagging today, I photographed all of the F1 PNG offspring individually to create an “inventory” of sorts; each fish will be posted individually going forward, which will allow for individual reference.  Some of the general white stripe offspring might be difficult to differentiate, but the Lightnings by and large should be easy enough to follow as they leave here and go through the sales process.

The main reason for shooting ALL fish that I currently am considering for sale is this – I don’t want anyone thinking that we held out and sold the “worst fish” first.  Nor do I want folks thinking there is an endless supply – there isn’t.  The one spawn that produced babies this spring gave me TWO FISH that are smaller than my pinky fingernail…I still have my work cut out for me with the wild pair.  Now, not every fish that I post up will necessarily be sold, and there may be some surprises if I opt to release other fish I’ve currently earmarked to hold onto personally for for other special projects.  Bottom line, it’s not 100%…but it’s going to be a pretty good idea of what’s likely to come.

How to get your Lightning Maroon Clownfish

Bid bid bid!  Until further notice, assume that you’ll be going through the Blue Zoo eBay auctions to get your fish. There are not going to be any other sources.  If someone approaches you with an offer to purchase a “Lightning Maroon” or a “Sibling” of the Lightning Maroon, feel free to ask me directly; chances are the offer is fraudulent.  I am not selling direct at this time for a number of reasons (one of the main ones being logistics and being a man of my word).  Here’s some tips on how you get your Lightning Maroon or siblings from Blue Zoo Aquatics.

1.  Register with eBay if you haven’t already.

2.  Add Blue Zoo Aquatics on eBay to your list of favorite eBay sellers.

Hit the “Add to favorite sellers” link in the righthand column on this page, and on the subsequent page, be sure to hit the checkbox to subscribe to email updates.

3.   Sign up for the Blue Zoo Aquatic’s newsletters (Both of them)…

…so you get email notifications from Blue Zoo (the subscribe box is right on the Blue Zoo Aquatics homepage).  eBay favorite sellers may not email you every time or every item, so double down to be sure you don’t miss a listing.

4.  Polish your credit cards and request a limit increase! (just joking around). 

Note – you probably won’t need to use something like Paypal to pay Blue Zoo, although I assume they’d take it.

5. Make sure you’re ready to have these fish.

Make sure you can quarantine them.  Potentially have on hand Formalin and Cupramine, just in case – Brooklynella can just as easily be lurking in your systems, and Formalin is the only effective treatment.  Maroon Clowns are notoriously susceptible.  Make sure the tank is set up, established, you have breeder nets on hand should you need to segregate anything, and have a good fitting lid to prevent jumps.  These fish aren’t small, they’re good size and most all can eat Spectrum Thera A 1 mm pellets with ease.  I do not want to hear that someone got these fish only to kill them quickly.

6.  Review all the photos of potential fish in the “inventory” here on The Lightning Project

Note that “SOLD” fish are obviously not going to be available. Just make sure you know what’s out there so you’re not feeling like you missed out or didn’t get your fair shot later.

Understand that the quality on some fish is definitely sub-standard, and few are without blemish (in my opinion).  There may be fin deformities or other qualities that ordinarily would warrant a fish be culled.  MOST of these issues are likely cause by rearing and specifically FIGHTING as young fish, and are not presumably genetic.  We will do our best to disclose any shortcomings in any particular specimen; the importance of genetic distribution and diversity are what drive the decision to sell fish that normally would be culled (it’s not a “greed” thing…the more F1 fish we have creating the F2 generation, the better it is for heading off inbreeding problems).

7.  Get ready to bid. As with any auction, there can be only one winner.  

As a seasoned auction buyer myself, know that most of the bidding happens at the beginning and end of the auction.  While I’ll advise you to bid your maximum from the get go, I know that we generally hate to do so because we often feel we got “bid up” at the end and if we hadn’t bid so high early on, we might get a better price at the end.  Perhaps, but most of the time I’ve found that not bidding your max just lets someone ELSE win it for less (because you didn’t really bid your max).

If you win, please make sure you can receive the package immediately upon arrival.  For me, this means take a day off from work if you have to…because these aren’t really replaceable fish! Don’t have the package sit outside in the sun all day – it took me almost 3 years to get these fish to you…so be a responsible aquarist.  Blue Zoo will set their own terms in terms of DOA etc.  Direct ALL customer-related questions to Blue Zoo Aquatics.

An Important Note to Would Be Lightning Maroon Clownfish Breeders

I cannot really legally enforce upon you an agreement that you’ll only breed these fish with other PNG White Stripe Maroons, but I implore you to do just that.  Be a responsible aquarist and conscientious breeder.

Please do not make Gold Stripe X Lightning hybrids; these have the potential to destroy the efforts of conservation minded breeders. It is possible that the Gold Stripe Maroon is a distinct species of Premnas (in my opinion) and hybridization between species cannot be undone.  The results of Gold Stripe X White Stripe Maroons are disappointing anyways, a mixture of the traits, which means only a pale yellow infusuion at best would occur.  If you want to work with really unique Gold Stripe Maroon variations, please work with the Gold Flake Maroon Clownfish lines out of ORA.

Always seek out the best possible mate for your Lightning Maroon Clownfish.

In the absence of wild PNG Maroon Clownfish to purchase as mates, the next best possible mate is one of the F1 siblings.  I am working on producing other lines of PNG White Stripe maroons at this time, so please be patient…I may have other options for you in the future, and breeders who are holding my F1 Lightning Maroons will get extra consideration from me should I have distinct bloodlines to offer in the future.  Should wild caught PNG Maroons once again become available, these are IDEAL outcrosses and would be the best choice to create a diverse, stable genetic base in captivity.  If you’re forced to go outside the PNG provenance to find another white stripe maroon mate, note that the PNG provenance cannot be “recovered”..once that purity is lost, it is lost.

Keep EXCELLENT records, and pass along that full lineage with your offspring…if you outcross to non-PNG white stripe maroons, please do denote that with any fish you sell.  DO expect a rather harsh public criticism of any efforts to hybridize these fish – they are far too valuable and need your efforts in preserving good clean bloodlines.

If you are one of the lucky winners to receive my fish, welcome to the “inner circle”.  Please do reach out to me and make a connection.  I may opt to start up an email chain or private forum for people working with breeding the Lightning Maroon Clownfish to further facilitate cooperation and  coordination in our efforts.

With all the stuff going on, I realized it’s been months since I showed the pair of Lightnings that I saved for myself.

I also wanted to update the “Lightning Maroon Clownfish Pattern Progression & Development” post, as there is obviously still a fair amount of justifiable skepticism as to whether these offspring will ever wind up looking like their mom.

At this point the fish are just under 1 year old. Here’s a quick look.

And no, these ones aren’t for sale.

I’ll let the recipients decide when and how they’d like to share their new arrivals who are in transit as I type this.  Some more genetic material has left the building.  Here’s the pair of fish that went to destination #1 tonight.

Lightning Maroon Clownfish EC1, right flank

Lightning Maroon Clownfish EC1, left flank

White Stripe Maroon Clownfish EC2, right flank

White Stripe Maroon Clownfish EC2, left flank

It figures just as I’m starting to contemplate moving the Lightning Maroon Clownfish and her mate out of the basement and back upstairs into a display tank, she goes and throws down a whopping big nest of eggs back on 3-16-2013.  I sat on that news a bit mainly because I’ve been fundamentally too busy to share it; among other things, this has been a month on edge as we are expecting our second child.  At this point, we had labor over a month ago…so every little pain or contraction has me (and my wife) wondering if “this is it”.  For a month.  To say I’m frazzled is an understatement.

But sitting on this news did make for an excellent double-gotcha on this year’s “traditional” Reef Builders Lightning Maroon Clownfish April Fools for 2013.  No, I did not partner with Monsanto to clone the Lightning Maroon.  But those with real keen eyes did notice something they hadn’t seen before – Lightning Maroon eggs in a flowerpot  Curtis Kramer, Brandon Mehlhoff, and “Ted” – kudos to you for your mad powers of observation.

Here’s the spawn from 3-16-2013.

So this “third spawn” from 3-16-2013 hatched out on 3/24.  Here’s a photograph of the next the night before hatching, 3/23/2013.

By 3/27, it appeared that most babies were gone, but “no worries” I thought.  Why?  Because that evening, Lightning and her mate threw down another big nest that night, 3/27/2013.  That is the spawn I included pictures of on our April 1st, 2013, prank.

I pulled spawn #4 on the evening of 4/3 (technically wee hours of 4/4/2013 – my fishroom lights go off at 2:30 AM these days); the eggs went into a black round tub with 5 gallons of the water from the broodstock aquarium. Of course, it appears I jumped the gun as they didn’t hatch overnight and were still intact on 4/4/2013.  The bulk of the hatch occurred on the night of 4/5/13 leading into the next morning, although many babies and eggs were found dead yet upon the evening of 4-6, there were still apparently very viable unhatched eggs.  So a hatch potentially spread out over 3 nights?

As of today, 4/10/2013, there were maybe 5 larvae swimming around in the BRT.  If this was any other clownfish, I’d probably skip trying to rear them and just wait for my next run.

Admittedly, I am frustrated by this – my Onyx Percula pair has always had split hatches, and it seems that now the Lightning Maroon is as well and even my newly spawning Fire Clown pair (Amphiprion ephippium) is doing so as well.  The mortality following hatch is drastically high right now; it could be how I’m hatching them in the BRT.  There must be something about my husbandry or technique causing this, but I’m not sure what it is.  Off to ask the experts…

And sadly, the result of this is that there are STILL only a handful of Lightning Maroon offspring that will be put up for sale – even if I got a massive run at this point, it wouldn’t be until fall or winter that they’d be market size.  But there is hope.  As of 10:30 PM on 4/10/2013…yet another nest laid (Spawn #5).  I’ll be blunt; given that we could have a newborn baby in the house any day now, the odds are good that I’ll totally botch or not even get to spawn #5.  So for now, scant few, if any additional lightnings on the horizon beyond what I’ve already raised!

This does raise one burning question – do I move the pair back upstairs and risk putting them off their stride, simply to have them back on battery backups and such, or do I place a pairing of their offspring upstairs.  No easy call there…

Months back I moved the Lightning pair to the basement following the ongoing disease problems the pair was suffering through.  In short, this last ditch effort worked, and the pair (along with their Foureye Butterfly companion) have lived in a 33 gallon extra long since then.  Their Ecoxotic Cube Tank was bleached to sterlize, and then soaked with vinegar to take off all the coraline algae.  The tank was scrubbed, rinsed, and sat dry for months.

This story, combined with a lack of any photos, has led a few crackpots to suggest that the Lightning Maroon had in fact died / perished.  Well…I was down there shooting photos recently and thought “what the heck”

Of course, the long term goal has been to restore them to the original tank, this next time set up with Bubble Tip Anemones and not much else

Tonight I started down the path, filling the tank and adding fresh new substrate (Caribsea’s Fiji Pink).

Let’s see how quickly things clear up

Finally, some risk is diversified again.  The second of 3 locally-planned backup pairs is out of the house, this time going to Frank (who you may remember contributed the massive “Labrador” Maroon Clown to this project way back in the day).  Frank is an aquarist who’s in it for the long haul, so you know this pair of clowns is in GOOD hands.

The pair I sent home with Frank has lived together for months now…obviously far too young to be an actual pair, but the point is that they shared an 8 X 8 X 8 inch cubicle without killing each other.  The Lightning in the pair really is a nice fish, but the standard striped sibling is a pretty horrendous example and were it NOT for the fact that it’s progeny of the Lightning Maroon, would have long since been culled.  Still, it shows some of the classic “Horned Maroon Clownfish” patterning seen in the occasional aberrant wild Maroon Clowns from PNG .  Of course, it’s hard to know how many of the physical disappointments I’m seeing are the result of either fighting or general rearing mishaps, but I suspect THAT over genetic issues at this point in time.  I took the last few minutes before bagging them up to snap a handful of good shots.

You may recall that the first pair of Lightning offspring “left the nest” a while back to help serve as a genetic repository and safeguard should something happen here at my house.  Well, this morning, Mike (who you may recall played an integral part in rearing these babies for the first few days of their lives) shot me this photo of his Lightning.

Updated – he just sent over a cell phone shot of the other side.

Lookin’ good Mike!

Yes, here it is, has been too long.  With each passing day I am evermore convinced that my hypothesis about the Lightning pattern development is correct. The “lightning maroon clownfish pattern development” photo series post has been updated as well. This is what the Lightnings are looking like now.

This is the pair I’m holding onto to make a “Lightning” X “Lightning” pairing  Time to start feeding the one on the right twice as often as the one on the left so that 6 months from now, the one on the right is twice as big!

The left fish; future male.

The right fish; future female.

The most interesting thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve made no difference in care other than temperature and lighting; the large group in growout has been at warmer temps and has grown significantly larger and faster.  However, under only ambient lighting and in a group setting, they’ve not developed the intensity of color that these isolated specimens have.  I’m bringing on the lights to get these fish ready for sale!

Last Wednesday, December 5th, I was surprised and saddened to find a few dead Lightning Maroons in the larviculture system.  The mortalities were restricted specifically to the large aggregate group.  Many of you may be aware that Maroon clownfish are notoriously nasty to each other, so much so that some breeders have said that in white strip variants (which would include our Lightning Maroons) they can rear hundreds of fish and find only FIVE that are sellable. I had been planning for months now to segregate all the fish into individual containers, but each time I look at the fish, they seem happy, and the damage to their fins is less and less noticable.  In other words, up until December 5th, the fish themselves had given me no reason to separate them!

Well, the losses could have been from aggression, or they could have been from too many fish being in the same amount of space.   Perhaps the flow of water into their tank had been disrupted for a time.  Ultimately, I’m simply not sure what caused the losses.  One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed about the Lightning Maroons growing out is that the ones kept together have grown FASTER than the fish I separated out into individual containers.  The ones kept together are also more bold and outgoing.

Since I have a massive 200 gallon+ growout system here, designed specifically to grow fish out, I opted to MOVE all the Lightning Maroon offspring together into a 33 gallon breeder on the system.  I took this opportunity to do a headcount – of course now I cannot remember, but I think within the group, I counted around 48 fish (keep in mind I’ve given away 2 so far, and I fond out I missed 3 in the bucket, plus I have 14 in the cube runs, and I lost at least 3 + I had one jump along the way).  So my guestimate of 60-70 fish may have been very close.

At this point, the fish are getting “big”.  I had hoped to be selling some at this point, but we simply haven’t gotten there yet and holiday shipping traffic means that it is exceptionally risky to ship fish this time of year.  Better to wait.  So at this point, we probably won’t be selling any of these until after the first of the year.  Honestly, I’d LOVE to send them out sooner, but it’s just not in the cards!

In the meantime, you can enjoy some new photos!

First, some shots of my favorite and a bonus shot of one of the “runty” ones.

I’ve also gone back and updated the “month by month” progression post showing the pattern development on my favorite one.

And finally, some shots of the group of juveniles in the growout system…it has a bit of a cloudy water issue, which is odd because it has a massive skimmer and a sock filter…I’m thinking it’s biopellet related and make take it offline to see if that remedies the situation. If not, water changes are in the forecast!

Craig’s comments today got me thinking – I should show the progression of the pattern developing.  So this is for you Craig!  These are all the same fish; this is one I’ve decided to keep for myself…looks like it lost a ventral fin in early fights but is otherwise a really nice fish (take note, you can see how the damaged ventral fin has regrown / regenerated…looks like the other atrophied).  I’ll keep showing this fish in future progressions most likely.

August 8th, 2012

September 13th, 2012

October 23rd, 2012

November 13th, 2012

December 13th, 2012

February 22nd, 2013

March 23rd, 2013

NEW – June 18th, 2013