Amphiprion leucokranos
| Amphiprion leucokranos | |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Actinopterygii |
| Order: | Perciformes |
| Family: | Pomacentridae |
| Subfamily: | Amphiprioninae |
| Genus: | Amphiprion |
| Species: | A. leucokranos |
| Binomial name | |
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Amphiprion leucokranos Allen 1973 |
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Amphiprion leucokranos (White bonnet anemonefish) is a naturally occurring hybrid anemonefish found in the western central Pacific Ocean. Like all anemonefishes it forms a symbiotic mutualism with sea anemones and is unaffected by the stinging tentacles of the host anemone. It is a sequential hermaphrodite with a strict dominance hierarchy, features which are which are critical to the direction of gene flow.
The body of A. leucokranosis is orange or light brown and with a white head bar and a white mark on the top of its head, giving rise to its common name of white bonnet anemonefish. The head band may be continuous or not. They have 9 dorsal spines, 2 anal spines, 18-19 dorsal soft rays and 13-14 anal soft rays. They reach a maximum length of 11 cm (4 1⁄4 in).
There has been a long-standing theory that A. leucokranosis was a naturally occurring hybrid between A. chrysopterus and A. sandaracinos, with the fish being experimentally created in captivity. Its hybrid status was confirmed in 2015 with consistent ecological, morphological and genetic evidence.
In any group of anemonefish, there is a strict sized based dominance hierarchy: the female is largest, the breeding male is second largest, and the male non-breeders get progressively smaller as the hierarchy descends. They exhibit protandry, meaning the breeding male will change to female if the sole breeding female dies, with the largest non-breeder becomes the breeding male.
This strict sized based dominance hierarchy makes the relative size of the parent species critical in shaping the outcome of hybridization In this regard A. chrysopterus is one of the largest anemonefish, growing to 17 cm in length. while A. sandaracinos is significantly smaller growing up to 11 cm as a female and just 3 to 6.5 cm as a male. There is strong evidence, consistent with their relative size, of the larger A. chrysopterus always being the mother and unidirectional introgression of A. chrysopterus into A. sandaracinos via hybrid backcrosses.
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