Sea & Reef Aquaculture just showed off this exciting new strain of clownfish that is so exquisite, they’re outsourcing the naming to you all. Bred from a line of dark brown DaVince clownfish called Black DaVinci clowns, the new Amphiprion variety is jet black, with outlandish white patterns that cover a substantial part of the face, a unique trait even for domesticated clownfish.
There’s so many clownfish breeders and “new” strains being announced on such a regular basis, that it’s hard for any new ‘designer clownfish’ to stand out. Sure we’ve had the longfin clownfish varieties being revealed from both Sustainable Aquatics and Sea & Reef, but the longfin clowns fall more in the freak territory than the designer category.
Where the new strain breaks away from all the Picassos and Davincis and Platinums is that it is really starting to looks like an all white clownfish, that happens to have some black makings on it. This new clownfish strain definitely shows its Black DaVinci clownfish heritage but its marking looks more like a Holstein cow than it does a wild clownfish.
What really sets Sea & Reef’s new “super” DaVinci clownfish apart is the wild n’ wacky pattern of black and white especially on the face. This type of ostentatious patterning is what really grabs the aquarists attention since it has never been seen in captive Amphiprion before, but it does remind us a little bit of the Peacekeeper Maroon Clownfish that were bred in Israel.
Also what both the new super DaVinci and the Peacekeeper share in common is that their wild traits seemed to have ‘skipped a generation’ of line breeding. This is to say that the pattern definitely ‘escaped’ the handle of the aquarists breeding them and the genetics threw out unexpected traits leading to such a beautiful and surprise color pattern in these clownfish.
It’s possible that both the Peacekeeper Maroon and this new ‘super’ DaVinci clownfish are exhibiting a new kind of clownfish mutation that we have not yet seen before, and which could perhaps unlock a whole new palette for the domesticated line breeding of clownfishes. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves now.
Whatever it will be called, Sea & Reef Aquaculture will be displaying the new Holstein double black super DaVinci clownfish at MACNA this weekend and we can’t wait to see them in person.
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