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In our lab we use anemone fishes, which are also known as clownfish, like "Finding Nemo."
So they're very popular in the aquarium trade; mainly after that movie popularized them.
Of course, anemone fish are now by far the most popular aquarium fish.
Here at the Beckman Institute, on the third floor, we have about 2,500 gallons of marine aquariums now
that have about sixty breeding pairs of anemone fish.
Many species we study, including mice and so on, they have a much larger home-range.
But, in our fish, because they're tied to a sea anemone, they naturally only have a very small home-range.
And we can replicate that in the laboratory very easily.
And they can reproduce. And I think they show very natural behaviors in the laboratory.
Females lay eggs roughly every fourteen to eighteen days.
The eggs take about seven to nine days to hatch.
Males are subordinate to the female and are typically taking care of the eggs.
And the females are defending the territory.
[OUCH!]
In the ocean, you have fish just swimming by the periphery, or coming by once in a while,
that these anemone fish can protect their eggs from.
In the lab, tanks just aren't big enough to have fish swimming by occasionally.
You know, we can throw fish in there. And there's a tank full of fish.
And then, you know, everyone's fighting. And it's complete chaos.
But we can't replicate the natural environment where you have these,
sort of, intermittent instances of nest defense and vigilance behavior.
So we went to Indonesia to try to find our species, which is the amphiprion ocellaris,
in the wild, so we could do some field work with them.
We actually were following up from a research scientist who had already been
to Indonesia, and had mapped out where a majority of these fish were.
So we went back to those same exact sites.
We used the coordinates from a study that came out in 2003.
The island we were on, Bunaken... it's very far away, and it's very difficult to get to.
So this was, kind of, a scouting trip, just to go see...
How many can we find? What kind of an environment are they in?
How easy it will be to catch them and do the analysis we need to do on these fish?
The first thing I noticed in the wild is that, not all of the anemones, but some of the anemones,
are in positions where they're in this really turbulent water.
And the fish are having to spend an incredible amount of effort to just stay in the anemone;
which we obviously don't see in the laboratory.
The second thing, I think, that's really interesting is that these fish are really aggressive.
Both of males and... you know, we talk about the female being the more aggressive individual.
But both males and females are very aggressive.
And, unlike really any other fish that you see on the reef, they're spending
quite a bit of time and effort defending their nests... fighting off damsel fishes...
fighting off any other fishes that come near their anemone or near their eggs.
So we can't test that as well in the laboratory as we can test it in the field;
where this sort of stuff naturally happens all the time.
We're trying to find a way to do that.
We're trying to add individuals or nest predators that we can introduce.
Maybe it means putting them in really large tanks, so we can have more natural vigilance events.
But those are things we're working on now to try to uncover.
It was clear that they were a great species to study for the purposes of catching them,
because they're real easy to catch.
They dive into the sea anemone. And so you can easily just net them that way.
They're actually easier to catch in the wild than they are on the aquarium.
[DeAngelis] But we just didn't find enough of them.
[Rhodes] And we don't know whether that's a result of pollution, predation, changes in whatever.
But the fact of the matter is, there just weren't enough really to make it feasible.
[DeAngelis] Now, is it possible that we could go back there and do a study?
I think it is possible. Just, I think, it's probably more likely that there are
better geographic locations to go back and do a field study.
But I think the positives are that it really is an excellent system to study in the field.
You know, they're stuck to their anemone.
They're easy to find. They stay in the same place.
So you can go back to the same geographic location and find
the same exact individual fish over and over and over again, you know, for many, many years.
And so that's just a really cool feature of the species.
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