My Longfin Fairy Wrasses - Males or Females?

[Mihai]

Hi,

On Wednesday I got three longfin fairy wrasses (or social wrasses) - Cirrhilabrus rubriventralis from LiveAquaria:

http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod ... CatId=1158

The problem is that I don't know if they are male or female. From what I've read, in this genus there is always a big difference between males and females and all these three are almost the same. But I can't tell if they're males or females and I have arguments for both sides :

They should be females because:
- I can't believe that Live Aquaria would send me three males when they know they don't get along.
- females are far more common than the males
- they didn't kill each other yet and when they chase each other is never for long

However,
- at least one displays (flashes) see the pictures
- allegedly the males are very nicely colored, while the females are subdued - those are all very nice colored!
- They seem to look like other pictures of males I found on the web.
- they do seem to chase each other at least to some extent.

So... please, please - are they males or females?

Thanks,
Mihai

 

[Mihai]

2 more pics...

M.

 

[Len]

Hey Mihai,

They're all males. Females do not have the clear demarcation of colors between top and bottom halves. Hopefully, the tank is large enough and two of them can still revert to female. If not, my experience is also that males will eventually learn to coexist relatively agreeably, but the biggest specimen will always show some aggression. The other two will either turn to female or to subdominant male forms (somewhere in between what a male and female looks like).

 

[Mihai]

Darn!

The tank is 90 gal with lots of LR. Actually at this time all three are co-existing in the left half (it may be because the right half has two clowns and a royal gramma). The order was for 5 of them and all five that came (one DOA, one never seen after it was introduced in the tank - presumed dead at this time) were males in this case!

How did they get 5 males? I thought that in the wild there are 10-100 females for every male... and also a male is defending an area of many many square yards...

At the moment they only chase each other "playfully", without real desire to harm or really chase out of "his" half. I hope that they can keep doing that until two revert to females.

Thanks,
Mihai

 

[Len]

In the wild, the males swim further away from the shelter of substrates and are usually easier to catch. They are also A LOT more gaudy, and divers have a lot easier time spotting them. And of course, males look better and thus sell better, so they're caught more often the females.

I find most Cirrhilabrus will only get in very few serious tussles to establish pecking order. Unfortunately, sometimes this leads to some physical harm. After that, it is mild chasing to reinforce the social order.