The orange and white clownfish star of the hit cartoon movie “Finding Nemo” really is able to find his own way home after spending months at sea, an Australian-led team of international researchers said on Friday.
“When they are out in the open water they are actually quite sophisticated. They can swim well, they can smell, they can see, they can hear well, and they use a whole suite of senses,” joint team leader Glenn Almany told Reuters.
Studying a tiny coral reef in Papua New Guinea, the researchers found 60 percent of baby clownfish find their way back to their home reef - only 1,000 feet wide - after being swept into the open ocean at birth.
The fish were identified using a world-first tagging method in which adult clownfish and butterflyfish were injected with a harmless barium isotope which they then passed on to their offspring, allowing identification of their juveniles.
The finding, announced in the international journal Science, will help researchers understand the extent to which young fish return to their home area or go off to interbreed with more distant populations.
That in turn could help determine which populations needed protection or better management for sustainable fishing.
Almany said the team still had no idea how the clownfish knew which reef they came from, or how far they travelled in open sea during a journey lasting around 11 days.
“How they actually determine whether that reef is home or not is anyone’s guess, but as an educated guess I would say that there might be some sort of chemical imprinting going on when they are born,” he said.
The team of Australian, French and U.S. scientists, working out of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at Queensland’s James Cook University, planned follow up studies in Australia with larger fish species.
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