How do I get my clowns to lay eggs

Feed them lots of different foods make their home really comfortable dont add any fish that might bother them and also make sure you have a mated pair

Feed them about 8 times per day.

Adam

Leave your lights on a bit longer too.

I have had Rods Onyx (True Percula variation) for about 1.5 years when I got them they were tiny so they are still faily young I feed new life spectrum every other day tank mates are tail spot goby and lawnmower they hang out together most of the time so I assume they are a pair little one twitches for the big one often lights are on a 12 hour cycle temps rock solid at 77

Sounds like your on your way Andy. It's always a great sign when the male is twitching at her. Are they cleaning any surfaces at all?

 Pam

So how old do they need to be before they will mate?  I have a pair of clowns in my reef tank that have a pretty good spot in the tank and my temp averages about 80 during the day with a drop to about 76 at night.  My clowns are about 3"+ each and I have had them for over a year now.  I feed mine a mix of algae flakes and mysis/brine shrimp every day, once a day.

I alternate brine/mysis/algae flakes/spirulina enriched brine. They are close to the same size, but I am fairly sure that the smaller one became a male after all of the competition they went through for supremacy. They are black ocellaris clowns. I didn't realize they needed that much food though. That kind of feeding sounds messy.

I'm not sure that I'm ready to have my clowns spawn, but go ahead and say it.  My guess is that you are going to say something about how good variety is good no matter how you give it to your fish and that there are a lot of other foods that are better than flake foods because they are more natural and closer to what the fish eat in the ocean.

Ok, so let me tell you a tale of two clowns.  This happened about a year and a half ago.

I bought 4 clownfish all at the same time from the same store, but they were kept in two different tanks.  I bought 2 black ocellaris and 2 orange ocellaris clowns.  They were paired in the tanks such that a black was with an orange in each pair.  I liked the lot of them as they all had excellent color and looked very healthy and I figured that it would be cool to have two pairs of clownfish in my tank, one orange and one black.

At first, everything seemed fine and all of the clownfish lived together in one big happy school.  The black ones were a little larger than the orange ones, but the size difference was not overly significant, except that the smallest orange was about half the size of the largest black.  After a few months, I noticed that the larger black and the two orange clowns were being very aggressive towards the smaller black clown.  This sent the black clown fish into hiding and the other fish wouldn't let it come out to eat unless I stuck my hand in there and corralled them away sometimes.  It became very nerve wracking and I was afraid I was going to lose my clown.

After about a month of this tension, peace was restored in the tank and the smaller black clown appeared to be satisfied in submitting to the larger black clown.  I assumed at this point that my smaller black clown had assumed its role as the subjective male in the pair and so things had quieted down.

Within a month or two of this happening I saw that the 2 black clowns and the smaller orange clown were being even more aggressive towards the larger orange clown (third largest fish in the tank) than the other fish had been towards the smaller black clown.  This went on for a long time.  The larger orange clown was eventually killed and I was left with three clowns.

I thought that was the end of it, but unfortunately, I was wrong.  The two black clowns teamed up against the smaller of the original orange clownfish and killed it.

This left me with 2 black clownfish who follow each other around and like to gang up on me whenever I work in the tank.  I have been bitten countless times by this pair of clownfish and they have even drawn a little of my blood.

Given all of this, I assume that I have 1 female and 1 male, the larger being the female and the smaller having assumed the role of the male.

Is there anything that seems fishy about my story?  Other than the fish of course.