Flying Your Colours With Pride

Clownfish continue to be one of the most popular marine fish for aquarists today and it’s easy to see why. There are few fish that are as beautiful and as entertaining, and with such a wide variety of species, there’s a species of clownfish suitable for just about any marine aquarium.

But this wide variety of colours and markings is a direct result of the clownfish’s unique breeding habits and territoriality. For example, as marine species go, Clownfish have surprisingly large young. While other colourful marine fish such as the Yellow Tang have tiny fry that are quickly distributed across huge stretches of ocean, Clownfish lay their eggs in large batches on flat surfaces near to a host anemone. The fry thus tends to stay localised to a much smaller area, often straying only a short distance from where they were hatched.

This means that while Yellow Tangs will look much the same wherever you find them, Clownfish populations will be much more localised and more highly adapted to their own particular environment. This means that they will display much more differentiation between populations, resulting in the marvellous variants available today, such as Black clownfish, or the beautifully-named Picassos.

Over twenty years of tank-breeding have taken this differentiation one step further, with even more beautiful variants arising thanks to careful selection and cross-breeding. But nature itself has provided the original palette that breeders can work from..