Maroons laid eggs, now what?

[SpateD]

I breed clowns and know first hand, you can feed your baby clowns pellet foods as early as 7 days. You can order foods from Reed Mariculture called Top Dressed Otohime (TDO). This food can be extremely small. Reed also sells instant algaes, which instead of growing your own phyto, which can be a complete pain... You just add the instant algae to your rotifer culture once or twice per day, and they are more nutritional than would be if on phyto IMO. I've gone a different direction and used a pepper mill to grind down my regular New Life Spectrum pellets to be small enough for them to eat.

The main thing to think about when breeding clownfish is how long is going to take you to sell a nest of babies. If you think 6 months average growing period for ocellaris to be a salable size, and a nest of 200 fish... How much are you going to spend on foods for these 200 fish, are you going to be able to house them comfortably for the time period they're in your care.. Who are you selling them to.. and how much are you going to sell them for.

The thing about maroon clowns is not everyone wants one. Most people just want nemo for their kids to see... Or a clown for the sake of having a saltwater tank and a clown. So where someone could sell 200 ocellaris in a month or two to multiple stores... you're going to have a far harder time selling 200 maroons. Not to mention they'll take longer to grow I'm sure. (I don't have maroons)

If you leave them, they'll continue to lay eggs for their lifetime, random events may cause they to stop for awhile. You could also sell them to other breeders who are looking for a spawning pair.

[KPG007]

Great information! This is their first clutch (that I've seen), so I will let them go through the process for a while before I try rearing the young. I would like to try more for the experience then to try and make money, but, as you mentioned Spated, when you have 200 fish at the end, what do you do with them?
Right now its a cool experience, and with my leopard wrasses doing a love dance every evening lately, there is always something new to learn and see.

I love this hobby!

[SpateD]

Wrasses would be awesome to try and breed. I don't know of anyone who's had any recorded success with them though.

Breeding marine life is certainly an exciting thing. I still get excited when I see a nest hatch, and I've seen a few. I wish more people had success and tried to breed new species as well. Our reefs depend on us to control the wild caught population, which in turn means we need to be able to produce more tank raised fish for the aquarium hobby.

[kobelka]

Hey there,
I raised 3 or 4 batches of occelaris for the exact reason kpg said. For the experience. It was work. I used the instant algae spated mentioned. I ground up my nls pellets and went from Rotifers to powdered pellets. it was amazing to see a 10 gallon tank full of little clowns. Most amazing was metamorphosis waking up to find the little brown fry turned into perfect little orange waggling clowns. I would suggest try it some day, when you have some spare time!!
Dave