Melanurus Wrasse

So, uh, is anyone else experienced in sexing melanurus wrasses? lol

 

You know, I think Dingo is right. What threw me was that your wrasse has his fins folded in the picture. The male has more colorful fins. The body is more colorful in the male, but that would also depend on the photo. Here is an old picture of my female. The fins are a little more transparent.

 

did your female morph yet or did it die or is it just still female?

 

Reefkeeping Magazine - Fish Profile

 

What caught my attention:

"An elongated torpedo-shaped body with red lines originating at its mouth and extending to the base of its tail. The juvenile's colors are a pale blue body color with feint red stripes. As an adult, their colors become more vibrant. The face of the fish has a yellow or green background which blends to a blue hue beyond the gills. The horizontal stripes become brighter, but more irregular and splotched. The adult body has a series of vertical blue "stripes" that extend from the dorsal fin and appear to 'break" the red lines. The tail is blue with a characteristic spot, although I have seen some specimens that do not have this spot."

What I'm guessing is that mine is just getting to be an adult (it's about 5 inches), and hasn't transformed to male yet, at least fully. You can see that mine has what look like irregularities starting to develop on the top horizontal lines, and that one is broken in a spot. It has a bit of the greenish hue near the face and caudal fin. It has the pale blue lines from the dorsal fin, but they don't break the horizontal lines quite yet, as they still have a faded version of the lines underneath them.

This sound like a decent guess? lol.

 

It's still a female, but I sold her when I bought a Leopard Wrasse.

 

I would say that would be as good of a guess as you can make.

Sexing fish is pretty tough sometimes.

 

if i could access more than just the abstract, this thesis would be pretty much perfect:
http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/81/1/01front.pdf

I tried to find it through my PSU libraries account but to no avail :-/
All i could find on there was the biochemical processes influencing a sex change in wrasses of the same genus... useless!

 

I can see where yours is starting to develop the three vertical lines as compared to barbianj's obvious female. I would guess that yours is in between sexes...
I also dug up that it only takes about a month for the dominant female in an harem to turn to a male in the wild so maybe we will be seeing the transition in yours for the next few weeks?

 

SpringerLink - Journal of Ethology, Volume 18, Number 1

Territorial males were larger and brighter than females in this protogynous fish. The males had longer, colorful ventral fins and colorful caudal fins, both of which were used during courtship. Multiple regression analysis of the effects of male characteristics on male mating success revealed that the yellow spot at the pectoral fin base was the most effective.