Monthly Archives: August 2015

I’ve really been holding off on adding fish to my tank. It’s a tiny tank, so I was considering just the one fish, at the very most 3. Of-course I considered a pair of clownfish, but I really wanted to keep an eye out for something different. I’d seen a few fish at the local shops that took my fancy, but none of them tempted me enough to take them home, but then I found these designer clownfish on the Reef Secrets Facebook Page and I instantly contacted them to secure the purchase.

These guys are not your usual clown fish. They’re designer clownfish, specifically DaVinci Clownfish which were aqua-cultured in the US. Their body colour is similar to the standard clownfish, but the stripes are very different. I could have bought them direct from the US, but that would have cost a lot more and hoping that they arrive alive would have been super stressful.

These guys came from Queensland, even then I was freaking out about whether they would get to me alive, or not.

I usually get deliveries at around 11AM, but nope, nothing. I was in the middle of a shoot and contacted the seller to say the delivery still had not made it. A few minutes later the doorbell rang and it looks like I was the driver’s last stop (poor fish have been on a plane overnight and in Sydney traffic all day!).

I didn’t hesitate to pause my shoot. The fish come first! I unpacked the esky and found one very dead looking clownfish in one bag, and another barely moving in the other bag.

My heart sank.

The bags were freezing cold. I was immediately really pissed off with the seller for not doing more to keep the temperature up in the package (the one heat pack didn’t do anything for the water temps). I contacted them to let them know of the situation and got a one line reply: “Clownfish are tough, just temperature acclimate well.”.

I left both bags afloat for a good 40 minutes and amazingly one fish was swimming strong and the other much more dead looking fish was upright at the bottom of the bag. I put both of them into my little breeder box in the tank so that the shrimp (1 of which is almost 3 times the size of these crazy tiny little kids!) wouldn’t eat them alive, and once the almost dead looking clownfish saw his mate he began swimming!

I knew clownfish were tough, but fucking wow!!!

PS: I’ve also spotted this crazy looking nudibranch hitchhiker this morning. And in not so good news, it looks like another one of my nassarius snails is going to die overnight. It’s sitting on the sand bed and not burying back into the sand. I assume that like the last one which died the other day it’s completely starved of food as the shrimp just eat everything I throw in before it hits the bottom.

I put in a big order for frags from Fragalicious and luckily I could acclimatise them all at the same time in my massive salt water drum (which is heated to the same temp as the tank).

The last time I bought frags off these guys the zoas took weeks to open, this time around they started opening straight away, which suggests my water quality is awesome now!

Hammer island! I have 9 hammer coral pieces all up now! Crazy!

I impulse bought this duncan (it’s still opening up). Different colours to the usual. I had placed him on the left, and he looked perfect there, but the torch started stinging him so I’ve had to move him over to the right for now.

I’ve got a fair few frags on the sand bed for now until I find a better place to put them. Note the leather is coming back too now that it’s not touching the aggressive torch corals.

Top down shot.