File photo of a clownfish in a California aquarium. Research shows that baby clownfish sometimes travel hundreds of kilometres across the open ocean to find safe places to live.
In the movie Finding Nemo, a father clownfish swims across the ocean to find the son he lost, but in reality, it’s the babies that make long journeys to survive. In their first days of life, clownfish larvae can swim up to 400km to find a home, said the study out last week in the journal PLOS ONE.
“That’s an epic journey for these little dudes,” said co-author Stephen Simpson from the University of Exeter. “When they make it back to the reef, they’re only a few millimetres long and they have only a few days to make it there, so they must be using ocean currents to assist their migration.”
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