Velvet anemonefish
| Velvet anemonefish | ||||||||||||
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Velvet anemonefish ( Premnas biaculeatus ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name of the genus | ||||||||||||
| Premnas | ||||||||||||
| Cuvier , 1817 | ||||||||||||
| Scientific name of the species | ||||||||||||
| Premnas biaculeatus | ||||||||||||
| ( Bloch , 1790) | ||||||||||||
The velvet anemonefish ( Premnas biaculeatus ) is the largest species of anemonefish with a maximum length of 17 centimeters . However, males remain much smaller (6 to 7 centimeters). It differs from all other anemonefish in that it has a sting on the lower gill cover , which is why it is also called the spiny anemonefish . The velvet anemonefish lives in the coral reefs of Southeast Asia , New Guinea , the Solomon Islands , Vanuatus and in the Great Barrier Reef at depths of one to six meters. It lives with the bladder anemone ( Entacmaea quadricolor ) as a symbiotic partner .
features
The velvet anemonefish is light, brown or burgundy in color. Young fish and the small males tend to be bright red, the females become increasingly darker and tend to be chestnut-colored or almost black with age. The length of the fish is 1.9 to 2.3 times the body height. A horizontal stripe runs directly behind the eye over the head, another, runs from the indentation between the spiked and the soft rayed part of the dorsal fin to the anal fin , a third over the caudal stalk. The stripes are white, gray in large females and yellow in the population around Sumatra and the Mentawai Islands . They are narrower than the anemonefish of the genus Amphiprion .
The dorsal fin has nine to ten hard and 16 to 19 soft rays, the anal fin has two hard and 13 to 15 soft rays. The pectoral fins are supported by 16 to 18 fin rays. On the first gill arch there are 17 to 21 gill trap processes.
Velvet anemonefish feed on zooplankton and algae .
Systematics
The velvet anemonefish was originally described by Marcus Élieser Bloch as Chaetodon biaculeatus . Today it is, after Gerald R. Allen temporarily assigned it to the genus Amphiprion , the only species of the genus Premnas . Some authors, such as Rudie H. Kuiter , see the yellow-striped specimens from Sumatra as a separate species, which was given the name Premnas epigramma . Phylogenetically, the velvet anemonefish is the sister species of the subgenus Actinicola (actual clown fish) in the genus Amphiprion and is so closely related to Amphiprion ocellaris that it can be crossed with it.
literature
- Dapne G. Fautin, Gerald R. Allen : Anemonefish and their hosts , Tetra-Verlag (1994), ISBN 3-89356-171-4
Web links
- Velvet anemonefish on Fishbase.org (English)