Trigger clown

[msjn771]

How hard is it to breed trigger clowns?

[FMarini]

Hi:
thanks for the email...
Do you mean Clown triggers? or some sort of clownfish?

I'll assume you mean triggers and not clownfish...actually this will let me kinda explain why many interesting fish are not bred in the home aquarium.
sexually mature clown triggers are a little smaller than an NFL football in size, this fish in the wild forages/protects almost 1 acre of ocean floor bottom for food/shelter/mates.As you will read below the adult male clown trigger has a series of females in his "territory". In the home aquarium an sexually mature clowntrigger can reach max size and would require a tank bigger than 200gals to support it. The main problem w/ a small tank(200gal) is that this fish will become extremely territorial, and any new clowntrigger regardless of sex will be attacked. Many triggers are not sexually dimorphic including clown triggers and therefore one has to place a few clown triggers into the tank to hope for some sort of correct sex ratio.
So lets say you do have a spare 400gal aquarium that you want to dedicate to breeding clown triggers amd you have grown them since babies in the same tank and they have not killed each other in the 1.5 yrs you've had them to reach sexual maturity, would they breed?
Quite possibly, and the females dig pits in the substrate and lay the eggs and the male would come by and fertilzie them. So you can see how large a system you would need and how complicated this might becomes.
Now w/ that said there are a few people which have taken this endevor on, and you will read one of the solutions below

I have enclosed a quote from Al Theil which was taken from a recent interview
"Albert:Â* One has to set up and replicate the natural environment as much as possible.Â* What happens with these clown triggers is that one male will have a real large territory. Within that territory there are sub-territories, each occupied by a female. The male then goes around at spawning time and fertilizes the demersal eggs of each female after courtship etc.Â* Well the usual, shall we call them rituals, than need to happen for the female to accept a male and actually spawn. This requires setting up a large rectangular aquarium that really does not need to be deep, but it needs to be long and wide and covered with sand at the bottom as the female as to be able to dig pits where the eggs can be laid down for the male to come and fertilize.Â*Â* Right now the set up is in the stage where one male is in a large vessel (10 feet long by 6 feet wide by 16 inches high).Â* It is made out of wood that has been treated with marine polyurethane and sealed.Â* Water level is about 12 inches high. The courtship activities have begun, but there still is a way to go. The females are not "ready" yet.Â*Â* I could force this by injecting them with hormones, but do not want to do so. I want nature to run its course and see what happens. "

So currently this is the "state of the art" on clown trigger breeding, once you have the eggs, your partially there, and we can discuss getting demersal eggs to fry stages next.

I hope you were interested in triggerfish and not clownfish
frank

[msjn771]

Thanks for the info, right now I have a 150 gallons, but I am working with a guy who has a 400 gallon tank. So hopefully I will get that, and I was thinking of buy adult clown triggers instead of babbies, would that be a mistake?