Sunday, February 13, 2011

Photo of the Week: The Weird Life of Nemo (Clownfish and Anenome)

The striking clownfish became popular with the movie Finding Nemo. This curious tropical fish has one of nature's most remarkable symbiotic relationship with the poisonous sea anenome where it lives its life. Immune to the poison tentacles, it attracts other fish into the anenome's deadly lair, the clownfish able to feed off the remains of the prey. The clownfish additional cleans the anenome's tentacles.

The clownfish can alter its sex. Always born male, on the death of the dominant female, the primary male turns female.

How does such an elegant an attractive fish harbour such an intriguing lifestyle?

4 comments:

Barbara Weibel said...

Didn't know that about their ability to change sexes! Fascinating. There seems to be plenty of that going around, especially here in Bangkok :-)

Sherry said...

Wow - this is way more complicated than Finding Nemo! Some very cool trivia!

Mark H said...

@barbara: I love your parallel with Thailand...

@sherry: Amazing creatures behind the fun of Disneyfication.

Anonymous said...

Really Gr8 ! Thanks For sharing..

 
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