In our recent visit to Bali aquarich, we were greeted again with two new hybrid varieties of pygmy Angelfish. It looks like this place is an hybrid factory, every month comes with its share of new fish.
Since Mr Su purposefully mixes all kind of Angelfish in his huge spawning pools, it’s always a lottery to try to find out what hybrid crosses we’re going to get. We are always speculating when it comes to half inch juvenile hybrid angelfish. It’s only when they reach adulthood that we can finally give an almost truthfully answer as to what possible mix are in these fish. As for now, it’s only speculation.
Centropyge vroliki x Centropyge flavissimus?
A couple of weeks ago, Mr Su sent us a picture when the fish was barely 1/4 inch, and the yellow hadn’t come out yet. It really looked like a classic Half Black Centropyge vroliki. But since we first saw it, a nice yellow tint developed all over its body.
On these very small juvenile fish it’s often very difficult to actually distinguish some traits. And it takes a massively zoomed in photograph to really be able to see the smallest details. We quickly noticed on the picture a nice blue ring around the eye. These two features led us to thing that the possible other parent is the Lemon Peel, Centropyge flavissimus. This hybrid is found very rarely in the wild, especially in the west Pacific area, and the few specimen have already been collected. But it’s been a while since we heard of one coming up.
Lemonpeel halfblack angelfish hybrid from LiveAquaria kicks it up a notch
We are very eager to find out what these fish are going to grow into. And if the whole batch will be similar, or if we will have a full range of different fish.
Centropyge bicolor/ C.joculator x Centropyge multicolor?
The other nice treat we were greeted with was another very weird hybrid angel. At the moment the best possible assumption would be a mix of Bicolor Angel (Centropyge bicolor) or Joculator Angelfish and Multicolor Angelfish, Centropyge multicolor. The only hybrids of Bicolor Angels we ever heard of was with herald’s yellow Angelfish.
Since the distribution of bicolor and multicolor angelfish is quite different – It’s only possible to find these two species together in Fiji and Samoa – we have never heard of any natural hybrid of these two species. We’re quite familiar with a lot of aberrant Bicolor Angelfish, but Multicolor are a lot harder to come by. Both fish belong to distant lineages within the family. So the best possibility would probably be C. joculator x C. multicolor
The resulting joculator x multicolor looks very similar to a joculator, especially the blue ring around the eye, but the faded, bleached sides are pointing to the Multicolor. These two new hybrid fish are soon reaching market size, and will be offered on some few very specialized boutiques. Stay tune, and let us know if you acquire one of them, so we can monitor their adult coloration.
