melev

This showed up in my newsfeed tonight, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

The following was posted by Sustainable Aquatics today:
A few months ago a member of our staff, marine biologist Matthew Jolley, noticed an odd fish being shredded by his brothers in one of our many grow out tanks. Based on Matt’s attentive care and quick action it was saved.

This animal had very long fins and was being attacked by his brothers because he was different. We isolated him and he started to heal; although you can see he is still showing scars, he continues healing today.

We paired him with a wild caught female Ocellaris, which went very well and they are well bonded now. Matthew Carberry’s idea is: if this long fin feature breeds true, then we want to start with as little in-breeding as possible. If this feature breeds true, we will cross the offspring in the near future with a wide variety of other designer clowns.

We have not found a name for him yet, but we call him longfin. We will be taking suggestions from anyone who has an idea for a great name. If this breeds true and we select your name, the winner will be rewarded with two fish before they are released!

The pair has begun spawning and we expect in the next few weeks they will be successfully tending a nest. We do not know if the longfin feature will breed true, though such mutations are often dominant. We have seen perhaps 25,000 offspring from longfin’s parents and this is the first manifestation of this feature. We would expect such a mutation would not survive in the wild.

We will give regular updates on this development and hope to report a nest in the next few weeks. Hopefully, in a few months we can show their offspring and we will find out if this trait breeds true! Stay tuned!

(Please email jennifer@sustainableaquatics.com with name suggestions)

Here's their picture, followed by the same shot run through photoshop to see the structure more clearly.

I've never seen anything like it. Fascinating. If you want to follow for more updates, here is their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Susta...67887086613398