michealprater
Aquarium Advice Addict
I work second shift and tonite i went to a friends house and I just got home, it is 3:15 central time. Sometimes when I get home late (working second shift I never get home before 12:30 am) I like to look at my tank to see whats going on late at night. Keep in mind my photo period ends at 9:00 PM, so my fish have been asleep for about 3 hours. When I got my 100 gallon reef, I bought it completely setup and it had a pair of maroon clowns, the female being extra large and the male being medium. When I got the tank I decided to set up the 100 and take the contents from my 75 gallon reef and put it in the 100. My 75 had a hammer coral. Well, within a week of setting up the 100 the clowns had decided to host the hammer. I thought this was really cool, but wasnt nessasarly shocked because I have heard of clowns hosting hammers before. The weird thing was, normally when Ive seen a pair of clowns hosting a anenome or a coral the female spend the majority of the time with the anenome and only lets the male near it to sleep at night. I dont know if this is normal behavior, but in my tanks and all my friends tanks, this has always held true. However, this case is a exception to what I had normally seen. Due to the size of the female, she would never accually get in the hammer because it didnt have much room for her, so the male normally got to hang in it all the time, and at night she just slep beside it because her and the male couldnt fit in it together. Well, recently (as some of you know) I just purchase a very large devils hand leather(over a foot in diameter when opened). Well all of a sudden I noticed that the female has been swimming in it alot lately. So today I watched her for a while, and I noticed that when the male would swim up to it she wouldnt let him near it. I was like, wow!, my clowns are acting like normal clowns. The cool thing was the male would swim right back to the hammer. So when I got home tonite I noticed the female was buried in the leather and I thought, cool, she is accually hosting it . So then I looked at the hammer to find the male and he was not anywhere to be found. Upon looking at the devils hand I found him completly buried in there to where I could barely see any of him. So the point is, this is really cool cause my clowns are hosting more than one coral. I also noticed that when I feed them, some times they even try to feed my pulsing xenia. So basically my pair of maroon clowns are like the mom and dad of the whole tank! Stuff like this makes me realize why I wanted to get in the hobby in the first place and makes all the time and money worth while. Its is truely something I really enjoy. Well I just thought I would share that with you, hope you enjoyed my story.
