New Male Leopard Wrasse

ahhhhh i'm so jealous, i love wrasses! he's beautiful. i can't wait until i can get a red velvet fairy wrasse!

 

Thanks! Good luck on your red velvet. I remeber when i had my first salt water tank, my 29 gallon i had a carpenters fairy wrasse in there, he was beautiful i had him for about a year...sadly i lost him to ick, he didn't handle the transfer from my old 29 to the 65 very well. I'm thinking of trying to get one more fish into my 65 and it's def gonna be a fairy wrasse.

 

i have yet to see a wrasse in person but online i have yet to see an ugly wrasse, they are all so beautiful but i think i'm a fairy fan

 

99.9% sure those are two different species.

Smaller one is obviously a female Macropharyngodon bipartitus, larger one is either a female or a male Macropharyngodon ornatus, they're not sexually dimorphic if I recall correctly.

 

interesting, i just assumed it was a male based on it's coloration and what they told me at my LFS...i wasen't planning on breeding them i just think their patterns and colors are beautiful.

thank you for the info

 

You know... now that I look at it more I think it might be a male macropharyngodon meleagris. Not the same species as the female you have... you will be blown away when she becomes a male. Let me see if I can find a male bipartitus picture for you.

 

I think there are ~7 species of Leopard Wrasse. Here's what your female will turn into eventually, in my opinion, the prettiest gender/species of all:

 

At what age will that happen?

 

That IS beautiful!

 

Some updated pics of the two wrasses, they are gettin along nicely.
(click to enlarge)






Nice action shot but bad glare