What is a clown fish?
No, a clownfish does not look like a clown. Perhaps, the fish is so named because it’s colour is bright orange and it has white stripes on the head, body and tail - clowns often paint themselves with bright colours, don’t they? If you look closely, you will also see thin black lines around the white stripes. The clown fish belong to a group of small and attractively coloured fish called the damselfish. Do you remember Nemo from the Disney movie ‘Finding Nemo’? Well, Nemo is a clown fish. Like all other clown fish, Nemo lives among sea anemones. So, sometimes the clown fish is also called the Clown Anemone fish. Sea anemones are fish eating animals that look like pretty undersea flowers and have hundreds of poisonous tentacles. But the clown fish is unaffected by the tentacles which are poisonous to many other kinds of fish. As the clown fish has a special friendship with the anemones and is not affected by the poisonous tentacles, these fish are common in and around anemones. In fact, both of them help each other in their daily routine. This special friendship between the clown fish and the anemone is called a symbiotic relationship. Which means that although they are different creatures, they cooperate and depend on each other to live. The anemones protect the clown fish from most predators (other big fish that like to eat the clown fish like the barracudas that ate Nemo’s mum and his other siblings). The clown fish returns the favour by cleaning the anemone by eating the leftovers from the anemones’ meals. Clown fish live in the sea among sheltered reefs or shallow lagoons. They inhabit the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and also waters off North West Australia, South East Asia, Japan and the Indo-Malaysian region. If you are lucky enough to snorkel in the reef areas in these countries, you might be able to catch a glimpse of Nemo’s friends swimming around the anemones!