New FishVille Fish: Saddleback Clown

If you pay close attention to the supply of fish in Zynga’s FishVille, you’ll notice a new limited edition option available on the first page of the game’s store.

The Saddleback Clown is a slow-growing fish, that takes a full four days to grow to maturity. When its an adult, you can sell the fish for 8,000 coins, making it a great investment, if you’d like to purchase one for 8 Sand Dollars.

As its a limited edition fish, the Saddleback Clown will be available for less than a week. If you’d like to get your hands on one, head over to the game’s page and start shopping.

FishVille fish live three days longer ... but there's a catch

It's hard to count how many times we've skipped playing FishVille for a few days -- only to come back to find our finned friends floating belly up. Dead fish is one of the main reasons we prefer Crowdstar's Happy Aquarium over FishVille because, well, dealing with deceased pets -- even fish -- is too high maintenance (and a little morbid, if you ask me).

FishVille has taken a few small steps to ward off fish expiration in the game, first by introducing hibernators, designed to keep your fish alive for a few extra days. Now, unfed fish will get sick for three days before they die, and can be healed using medicine. Medicine can be sent as a gift or purchased from the in-game store for 1 Sand Dollar (that pays for a pack of 8 doses). You can also acquire more medicine along with your daily bonus.

The medicine seems more readily available than the hibernators -- for the most part -- but this new update still seems like a band-aid approach to fixing a bigger quirk in the game. Please stop killing our fish!

Fishville Adds Oyster Beds

Fishville developer Zynga gave players another reason to check in on their tanks once a day, late last night. All players were given an oyster bed!

This is actually a cooler addition than it might initially appear to be, so stick with me. Placing oysters will allow players to come back later and harvest them for coins or XP. Occasionally, an oyster will contain a rare item – Zynga referred to these mystery gifts as “great surprises.” The color of the oyster determines the quality of the prize when opened. White oyster is common, Black uncommon, Blue rare, and most treasured of all is the Golden oyster.

Black, blue, and golden oysters can be purchases with SD$, but players can gift white oysters to one another. So, essentially, these oysters are a little mini-farm players can tend to on the bed of their aquarium.

The oysters are featured under a brand-new “creatures” tab of the Fishville shop, so it sounds like other big additions to Zynga’s aquarium game are on the way.