That all seems correct from my personal experience. There would be a couple things I would add when it comes to color variation.
- Stress (almost all fish change color to some degree based off of stress or mood)
- Diet (similar to stress a fish's diet can contribute to color presentation)
- Geographic location (I've noticed that fish of the same species can have noticeable differences in color based of where they were collected from. The same can hold true for maroon clownfish).
- Strain (a ton of clownfish these days are captive bred and you can have difference in color just between breeders)
We have a number of wild gold stripe maroons from Sumatra in the shop right now and there is definitely variation in color between them. I noticed the color change a little within the first few days we had them. They came in darker upon arrival (the normal stress from shipping), and then brightened up over the next few days as they started eating well and got over their jet lag on used to the light cycle of our facility. Even among fish of the same size I notice that some have darker edges to their fins which makes the main body color pop more. I hope this helps, color variation in fish is definitely an interesting topic with a lot of variables.
