Raising Clownfish: The Beginning

Welcome to my adventures in clownfish rearing!

Several months ago, our Darwin Clownfish, Ozzie and Lara (so named because they're Ocellaris clownfish, obvs), started making eggs. Regularly. Every two weeks.

That's a lot of eggs.

They laid them right underneath the wavemaker in one of our display tanks, which is not a great place to put your eggs. While it certainly does keep them well aerated, the odds for survival when the fry hatch is effectively nill; if they don't immediately get snarfed up by hungry other fish (which, side note, they will), they'll get sucked into the wavemaker, chopped into tiny bits, and pushed right into the sock.

Awww! And also... WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?!

Watching this mass extinction of baby fish every two weeks pushed me to start figuring out how to raise the little buggers. Fortunately, Lara regularly laid her eggs in exactly the same spot on the glass every two weeks, which meant I could quietly sneak a pice of ceramic tile in there (as is visible in the picture above), and she started laying on the tile instead of the glass. I could then quietly remove (well, ok, maybe not that quietly; she did try to bite me) the tile the night that they were due to hatch, and move it into a nursery tank where the fry could hatch safely and I could lovingly feed them millions of rotifers so that they would get big and strong.

That was the plan, anyway.

The first few attempts didn't go so well, and I only had a few survive for about 24 hours. But then I had a full clutch hatch! This series is an attempt both to capture the excitement and to document the things that worked and that didn't work, so that I can try it again in two weeks with her next clutch...

Enjoy!