Foreword: Clownfishes
From Microcosm Aquarium Explorer
By Thomas A. Frakes
The first big surge in the popularity of marine aquarium keeping arose in the early 1970s, when the common belief that saltwater reef fishes were extremely hard to keep began to ebb.
This was a period when biological filtration finally started to be understood, and keeping fishes alive—rather than constantly replacing them as they succumbed after a few weeks—actually became feasible for home aquarists. Better technology began to emerge, beginning with silicone sealant for all-glass tanks that made heavy, pitch-sealed, slate-bottomed, metal-frame tanks a thing of the past.
At the same time, proliferating airline connections around the world made it simpler and more economical to ship exotic species to eager hobbyists. Beautiful marine creatures that previously had seemed unkeepable or unspeakably expensive gradually came within reach of adventuresome home aquarists.
Early Failures
The notion that marine fishes would never be reared in captivity also changed. Once basic filtration and care was mastered, the colorful and popular clownfishes were among the first to begin spawning regularly in well-kept systems. Unfortunately, aquarists watched in dismay as the eggs hatched and the larvae refused to eat, quickly starving. For a number of biologists aware of the growing interest in marine fishes, it was hard to resist the temptation to find a way to feed and rear the fry.
This scenario began to unfold in the same way that earlier freshwater tropical fishkeepers had grown bored of just watching their healthy fish and began the quest to uncover the secrets of breeding them. These freshwater hobbyists and breeders met with relatively quick success in culturing many of the popular species, and today more than 90% of the freshwater tropical fish available in pet stores are captive bred. It was already clear that saltwater species were not going to be as simple, but environmental concerns and the high prices and poor quality of many imported fishes subjected to collection and shipping stresses further stimulated interest in the breeding and marketing of marine tropical fishes.
Mariculture's Explosion
At about the same time, we were seeing an explosion of mariculture projects at government and private laboratories, with farmed fishes, crustaceans, mollusks, and algae seen as way to help feed the world’s masses and replace the stocks of dwindling ocean fisheries. The rapid advances in marine food-fish technology led some in the aquarium hobby to predict that many marine ornamentals would soon be tank-raised.
It seemed so simple. If raising marine food fish (seabass, pompano, shrimp, and oysters) valued at a couple of dollars per pound was economically practical, then marine ornamentals selling at $500 to $1,000 per pound should be a cinch! In retrospect, both of these predictions were premature, as there were many unforeseen problems. Anyone reading this book will have a keener-than-average interest in clownfishes, but might be astonished at the hopes, frustrations, triumphs, and failures they brought to those of us who first attempted to propagate them.
“Nest size would fluctuate for a given pair and eggs would hatch one time but not the next,” recalls Frank H. Hoff Jr., one of the early Florida-based experimenters. “Fish would spawn and then take three to six weeks to spawn again. Larvae were available, but the rotifer cultures collapsed. Post larvae died mysteriously within a short time after being transferred to juvenile grow-out aquaria or went into shock while being removed from larval-rearing aquaria. Juvenile mortalities would mysteriously increase after three months in grow-out. . . . Utter frustration mixed with brief periods of success is the best way to describe the early work and experimentation . . . .”
It quickly became apparent that the small size of clownfish larvae posed a greater problem than many had anticipated. Freshwater hobbyists used “infusoria,” a microscopic soup of protozoans, to feed early larvae, but these methods were unsuccessful with clownfishes. Another staple of the freshwater breeders, newly hatched brine shrimp, proved too large for the larval clowns to handle.
Feeding Breakthrough
One of the more important breakthroughs was the development of marine rotifer culture methods. Rotifers, at a fraction of the size of brine shrimp nauplii, turned out to be the critical initial food for many new larvae. Prior to this, culturists relied on wild plankton collected daily from the ocean, but this food was unreliable and fraught with problems. Rotifers allowed early successes with clownfishes and a number of other relatively well-developed marine larvae, but many other saltwater species were found to have larvae that were either too small to eat rotifers or would not accept them as a first food. Thus the great expectations from these early advances were crushed.
Still, the early adventures in marine tropical breeding were exciting for the pioneers. Martin A. Moe, Jr. started Aqualife Research Corp., which led the way with the first commercial marine tropical hatchery, followed closely by Instant Ocean Hatcheries (an outgrowth of Neptune’s Nurseries) in 1974, with Frank Hoff as director and myself as biologist. Sea World of San Diego ran a pilot facility under the direction of another marine biologist, Christopher Turk. Surprisingly, we all had worked at the Florida Marine Research Laboratory in St. Petersburg, Florida, before focusing on ornamentals, and there was a sense of friendly competition between these early ventures.
All three of our companies eventually produced commercial quantities of marine tropicals, mainly clownfishes, although profits proved as elusive then as they have for latter-day propagators. An important point is the distinction between commercial and scientific success: these early ventures overcame many of the biological problems, but their expenses generally exceeded income. Any reader who sees gold in the big-time breeding of marine fishes should know that all of these enterprises eventually experienced stumbled in trying to navigate the gauntlet to commercial success.
(Interestingly, however, many of the biologists who were drawn to the clownfish challenge are still involved in the marine aquarium world: Martin Moe, as one of the most respected authors in the field; Frank Hoff, founder of Florida Aqua Farms, providing supplies and advice to aquaculturists; Chris Turk, as founder of Ocean Nutrition, whose frozen marine foods are modern-day descendants of early clownfish breeder rations. I myself carried some of the hard-earned lessons on to Aquarium Systems and an involvement with live rock aquaculture.)
Modern Counterparts
Recently, companies such as Bill Addison’s C-Quest in Puerto Rico have made great strides in advancing the propagation of clownfishes and other reef fishes, adding many new species to the list of commercially cultured marine ornamentals. A new project, Oceans, Reefs & Aquariums (ORA)in Fort Pierce, Florida, has taken over where Aqualife Research left off and is projecting the production of over a million fishes a year.
Over the years, many of the original problems with clownfish nutrition, disease, behavior, and water quality were eventually worked out. The early companies were quite secretive, but gradually their methods have been made available to interested hobbyists who have then added their own improvements and now succeed regularly in rearing certain species. Some have turned their hobby into a part-time business: Joe Lichtenbert, of Reef Propagations, sells clownfishes to the Chicago market, while Morgan Lidster, of Inland Aquatics, has equipped a large facility in Terra Haute, Indiana, to propagate and market clownfishes, anemones, corals, and many other reef invertebrates. Others just breed fish for the fun of it, selling the excess fish to cover costs of new “toys”—often the latest aquarium equipment or new breeding stock.
Joyce Wilkerson is part of an elite group of early hobby breeders who tracked down the bits and pieces of information needed to succeed on a home scale. In this book, Joyce brings together her own experiences with the broad mix of information she has accumulated from the other professional and hobby breeders. Her work fulfills a long-felt need to bring this accumulated advice and wisdom together in an accessible way so that interested aquarists can practice their culture skills.
I suspect that this book will foster a greater appreciation for clownfishes in general (all of us who have worked with these species know how they can grow on you) and will bring their captive breeding within the reach of many more marine aquarists. If even a fraction of those who use this information to start with the more cooperative clownfish go on to experiment with and raise other more difficult fishes, this book will have made an important contribution. With the world’s reefs under mounting environmental and climatic pressures, we all have an interest in encouraging the growing body of knowledge about these species and in adding to the ever-increasing list of marine species we can breed.
Thomas Frakes is a marine biologist, editor of SeaScope and former research director of Instant Ocean Hatcheries.
From: Clownfishes
Editor's Note: We are sad to report that Joyce Wilkerson died in 2007 in Raleigh, NC.