The white bonnet anemonefish, Amphiprion leucokranos, is generally regarded to be a hybrid cross between a pink skunk and a bluestripe clownfish. So imagine out surprise when we stumbled across a video that purportedly shows what appears to be a White bonnet tomato clownfish.
The location of this video is unknown which makes it quite hard to narrow down what parent species could have constituted this very oddly barred tomato clownfish. Our best uninformed scientific guess is that this is a freak cross between an orange skunk clownfish, Amphiprion sandaracinos, and a tomato clownfish, A. frenatus.
The odd white bonnet tomato clownfish has the same high back profile and more ‘built’ face of a tomato clownfish but yet it has the brighter orange body of an orange skunk clownfish, and that broken head bar is precisely what you’d expect to see in a cross between the barless orange skunk and head bar of the tomato clownfish.
This particularly unique clownfish specimen looks for all intents and purposes like a tomato clownfish, at least in its body, but the broken bars around its head and lack of any other marking make this quite a special find. The brightly colored barring and perfectly round bonnet on top of its head make this fish look quite unique and had it been discovered in the aquarium hobby we could definitely envision this individual parenting a lineage of “domino tomato clownfish”.
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