It's a boy (Lyretail Morph)

I added 3 female Lyretail anthias a few weeks ago. Right after, I noticed one had a spiked dorsal fin. Another was aggressive, but only towards the submissive female, not the one with the spiked fin. So, I assumed the one with the spiked fin would become the male and the aggressive one was the dominant female. However, about a week ago, the aggressive one started looking a bit darker and mostly in the last three days morphed to this. The blackening of the fins literally happened over night. I'm still a little worried about the one with the spiked fin, but I've been watching carefully and there's no aggression or hiding. So, I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping I don't end up with two males. Really don't want to tear this tank apart trying to catch one I was able to just snap this photo of both together.

 

Very cool congrats

 

Very cool! Your male's fins went a lot darker than mine. It's really neat to see how different captive-changed males looks from one another.

 

Thats cool. I started out with 5 females and one has turned full male already.

 

Thanks all kcbrad and ReefBruh, I'm really interested in seeing progression of captive-changed males myself. Do you guys have pictures somewhere?

 

It's not the best picture, but you can get an idea. Since this picture was taken his dorsal spike has gotten very long and his tail streamers are very, very long.




For comparison, here's a female:

 

Cool. Hope they don't fight.

 

kcbrad, that's neat. It's amazing how much lighting changes the color too. Mine looked yellow like that at the lfs, but much more orange in my tank. I found some info elsewhere and there seems to be a lot of differences in the transition. Some, may be due to where it was collected from, but there are other unknowns. I think certainly coloration could also be due in large part to diet, so maybe that has a large effect too. Currently, I have a pretty wide mix. I'm using a automatic feeder, to feed twice in the day. This is a nutrafin pellets prime reef flake and cyclop-eez. And at night, Formula one frozen fish food and frozen cyclops, both soaked overnight in selcon.

 

Me too Well, i guess some bickering is expected, they are Lyretails... I definitely hope they don't hurt each other though. Some of the other info, from another forum, suggested that the dorsal in the dominant female is not that uncommon actually. People have not typically seen them morph unless the male dies. I was aware of this of course, but I hadn't heard about the dorsal elongation. I thought that was a sign of the transformation. I guess not. So far though, there isn't much aggression. There was some between the, now male and the submissive female, but that seems to have subsided now that the pecking order is clear.

 

I read that when females morph to male in captivity their coloring is vastly different. A lot of times they don't make it "all the way" to male coloring, etc. So there is a lot of variation! Mine definitely isn't as red as males collected straight from the ocean, but more pink and orange. Since turning male he has grown A LOT too...he's 5 inches now - and thick! LOL

Pretty neat! And they change so fast, don't they?! Cool!