The Lightning Project

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…

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!

So we’ve all but forgotten about the original Lightning Maroon, so I figured it was time to first step back and see how she’s faring.  Sadly, the Baytril-laced feeds do not appear to have had any effect.  About 18 days ago, we switched from the Repashy Gel to soaking Spectrum Thera Pellets with 0.05 ML of the injectable Baytril and approximately 0.15 ML of Brightwell’s MaxAmino, which seems to encourage a highly strong feeding response and probably serves to mask the flavor of the antibiotic.  This got us back on track from a dosing standpoint; while there were a few days where the fish completely refused food (generally on days where I’ve scraped the algae off the glass), most days see better than 90% being consumed.  Despite this success in treating, the Lightning Maroon has had more pop eye, more recurring mouth problems, and is currently showing signs of both mouth and fin rot.  There is little more demotivating than this.

Still, the babies are doing great, although there is a widening size disparity which seems to correlate to how aggressive and dominating a baby can be.  I pulled out two specimens to photograph today, and they somewhat show the extremes of the range.  This also happens to be, at least in the Lightning side, one of the individuals showing the heaviest white coverage, with the headstripe connected to the midstripe and the midstripe to the tailstripe, on both sides.  This is a 1/4 gallon (small) specimen cup (to give you a frame of reference).  Sadly, it appears as though the pelvic fins may have already been badly damaged in the fighting of the offspring…I have dozens of breeder nets on hand now to implement plans to start separating out these fish.

More photos, these from 7-27-2012:

The next batch of images, these from 7-20-2012:

The next batch of photos from a day later, on 7-18-2012:

So I’ve been busy, nothing else really to it, just busy.  I’ve been remiss in posting up some photos of the Lightning Maroon Clownfish offspring as they’ve been developing.  I’ll be posting up  a large collection of shots from the past couple weeks, and we’ll start with:

7-17-2012

These fish just keep getting better and better. I have tons of images, but I can’t wait until I can actually get really good images for everyone to see. I’m sure some people may be wondering why the images are so “crappy”. Well, I’m shooting without a macro lens for starters. But there’s also something more fundamentally basic here. And that’s the fact that these fish are still incredibly tiny. I’m not sure how many people actually realize how small they are. So here’s a shot from very early Friday, July 13th (basically, 14 days, or 2 weeks, post hatch).

…I will name this one Tesla.  12 days post hatch.  Already mean as snot and fighting in the tub.

"Tesla" The F1 "Lightning Maroon" Clownfish? We shall see...

Settlement is almost done…a few stragglers tonight, just before midnight on 7/9/2012.  You caught a glimpse of this expanded photo set earlier this morning @ ReefBuilders.

I have to pull my thoughts together to post up some very important information about possible genetics (granted, it is all premature…what looks “odd” at this point could totally vanish as the fish grow up). We all must wait and see. But maybe, just *maybe*, it’s time to start making routine deposits in a separate account that your wife/girlfriend/parents/husband/boyfriend doesn’t know about. This may all now be simply about how fast I can grow them up, and how good a job I can do at ensuring they don’t kill each other.