sweet find/sexing

[punkrockfish]

went to the nice lfs down here and they just happened to have 4 tiny gold ocellatus, and i just so happened to be in the market for such a fish. cute little things, and the guy gave me a discount because they were so small he felt bad charging me full price. got them on saturday, but i can't seem to find one of them now, and i fear my big julie might have got him (the guy is a terror), but he might just be hiding out. the other 3 seem to be doing well though.

My actual question is about how to sex them. Is there a way, or is this more of a get some when they are young and see what happens thing?

 

[Big Vine]

Forgive me for responding without providing an answer to your question, but I just had to chime in and say congrats! I've always been wanting to do an occie setup but never seem to have the tank space...now I can sit back and enjoy yours...just so long as you provide plenty of pics and maybe even a vid or two at some point, hehe.

BV

 

[punkrockfish]

it will be without one more occie, seeing as the julie i had killed one of them, so now i am officially down to 3....i have to share a computer (an old one at that, runs windows 2000) for the time being, but i'll try and get some pics posted soon

 

[straitjacket]

It is said that you can sometimes sex an occie by the trim on the dorsal. A gold trim means male, a white trim means female. It's not 100% reliable though. It's supposed to hold up better with wild fish or fish not far removed from wild. Those line bred for the brighter better gold color might not show such a distinction between the sexes but in our own gold occies (whom I can't imagine being anything close to WC fish) we can still see a degree of difference in the dorsal color.
A more reliable way of telling male from female is observing for size. Big ones are almost always males. Smaller ones are usually females but you usually get runt males in the batch. Of course this method works best in same age groups of occies.
When it comes to acquiring pairs or trios of Tang shellies or Neolamps I always aim for one large specimen (usually male) and two or more smaller ones. I've always ended up with at least a male and female of each doing this even when picking out very young fish or monomorphic species.