Just a few months after announcing the availability of lightning maroon clownfish, ORA made an even bigger announcement that they are now producing gold lightning maroon clownfish. This might seem like a small varietal change but regular and gold stripe maroon clownfish are more different than you might think.
Regular maroon clownfish are more orange-red in body color with thin white bars, while gold stripe maroons are more of a deep wine red to maroon in body color and usually much broader bars. Once upon a time these two variants were considered different species, Premnas biaculeatus, the only currently valid name, was used for regular maroon clownfish from the Pacific Ocean and most of Indonesia, and Premnas epigramma for the gold stripe maroon from western Indonesia and the eastern Indian clownOcean.
How all these genetic changes will be expressed in the gold lightning maroon clownfish remains to be seen. For one, gold stripe maroon clownfish don’t start showing the yellow colors of their bars until they are around one year old. Secondly, the crossing was likely made using lightning maroon clownfish and goldflake or gold nugget maroon clownfish.
Case in point is that the ORA Gold Lightning Maroon Clownfish could turn out to be very different fish when they grow up. Not only will their body stripes be more gold than regular lightning maroon clownfish, but we suspect there could be substantially higher coverage of the barring over the body than regular lightnings – only time and adults of this new variety will reveal how different or similar ORA’s gold lightning maroon clownfish will turn out.
