Thursday, April 4, 2013

Finding Nemo's Secret

Disney's Finding Nemo is a charming story about a daddy clownfish trying to find his son that was scooped up by a scuba diver.


The story doesn't go on to explain how Disney really didn't do their research before creating this film. When they developed 'The Lion King' the team took a trip to Kenya to research the African landscape and animals as part of the creative process.
Budgets must have dropped because the ocean habitat and the species in this movie are quite off base from nature's way. 

Clownfish were an interesting choice as lead characters. It meant having to hide a deep secret about their species lifestyle. Clownfish are transgender and are all born as boys. When a pair of boys hook up to become a breeding pair - one fish (the larger male) from the pair must transform into a female. This means eating a lot more food and growing 3 times the size of the original male clownfish. 


(Having worked with clownfish in a research setting in Australia I had to be careful when moving bins of breeding pairs pictured above. The transport would often stress them out. If the female became too stressed she would rip the male into floating pieces.)

If the female of the pair dies (like Nemo's mom does) the remaining fish will morph into a female and...What I am getting at here, is that Nemo's dad would have turned female after Mom's passing and Nemo would have been his new male mate. 
(No it wouldn't matter what egg batch he was from)

The movie also made it seem that there was a lot of stress around the clownfish anemone/household so that leads me to believe that 'Dad morphed Female' would have ripped Nemo up instead of searching for his irresponsible mate. 

Clownfish are so "funny"?

3 comments:

  1. Wow. I had no idea. Kind of frightened just thinking about it. I know I can handle eating lots of food, but wouldn't that be weird if one morning I woke up and was a different gender because I overate? Science is fascinating.

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  2. Hmmm, maybe Tim Burton should have made this film instead of Disney. Or Alfred Hitchcock! ;) There can't be too many fish that feature this gender chango-magico. Disney must be operating purely on the visual. There's gonna be a lot of disillusioned conservative kids out there when they get the news. Or maybe some parents just don't let their kids see this film. Nothing surprises me anymore.

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