By day 20, all were dead-another setback on a long road with a now imminent deadline. On day 17, a photograph taken of one member of the batch captured a mostly translucent, two-millimeter-long body with a splotch of yellow beneath a ghostly blue eye: a fish in a state of becoming. Some were swimming in tight little circles, also a sign of demise. Cassiano noticed that the larvae looked pinheaded, which meant they weren’t eating.
“You try not to get too excited because there’s a lot of disappointment,” he says. When the larvae surpassed another typical crunch point at 11 days, Cassiano wondered if they would finally make it. And while most previous trials had ended around day six, these fishlets lived on. Two weeks earlier, 4,000 eggs had hatched into nearly invisible larvae inside a cylindrical tub big enough to fit several toddlers. And he was eager to check on the not-yet-fish, which were defying expectations. Photo by Reinhard Dirscherl/Corbisĭory was, as usual, in the back of Cassiano’s mind when he arrived at work that spring day. Unlike blue tangs, they can be raised in captivity. As Dory graduates from sidekick to leading lady, the lack of a captive-bred option will drive collectors to source more blue tangs from the wild-a harvest that’s often unregulated and destructive.Ĭlownfish (or clown anemone fish) are native to tropical waters in the Pacific. That’s because even though Dory was a model of resilience and optimism in her perilous quest to rescue Nemo from a dentist’s office fish tank, young blue tangs have proven much less hardy inside lab tanks. When a similar rush for pet Dorys inevitably follows the new film, fragile coral reef environments are likely to suffer. Conveniently, clownfish are simple to breed in captivity, and demand was easy to satisfy.
Next month, Walt Disney Pictures will release the Pixar-produced film Finding Dory, starring the chatty and forgetful blue tang who played a supporting role in Finding Nemo, the 2003 animated hit about a young clownfish.Īfter Nemo hit the big screen, sales of orange and white striped clownfish rose by as much as 40 percent, according to some estimates. And after dozens of failed attempts over many months to raise the oval-shaped, yellow-streaked blue fish, pressure was now mounting from an unexpected source: Hollywood. The goal of the experiment was simple: to raise in a lab, for the first time, Pacific blue tangs from freshly laid eggs to fully formed iconic reef fish. Inside the Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory (TAL), the biologist’s destination was a much smaller body of salt water: a 210-liter tank filled with flea-sized baby fish struggling to survive-the latest attempt to conquer what had become equal parts scientific puzzle, conservation quest, and race against Disney. A few kilometers away, anchored sailboats bobbed in the marinas of Tampa Bay. | 2,400 words, about 12 minutes Share this articleĮric Cassiano walked into a windowless room at the University of Florida’s Ruskin campus on a humid spring morning in 2014. Now, as Finding Dory is about to hit the big screen, researchers race to grow captive-bred blue tangs to protect those in the wild. Photo by Juniors Bildarchiv GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo Breeding Dory When Finding Nemo was released, clownfish became the latest trendy pet. The release of Finding Nemo saw a spike in the aquarium trade for clownfish, and researchers are anticipating the same situation after Finding Dory launches. Clownfish and blue tangs are the real-life inspiration for the characters Nemo and Dory in the films, Finding Nemo and the forthcoming Finding Dory.
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