The fish live in their toxic tendrils, which keeps predators away. As anyone familiar with 'Finding Nemo' might already know, they rely on a symbiotic relationship with stinging sea anemone. The fund helps breed the species in captivity, but trying to introduce new clownfish into the wild isn't easy. in the Philippines, parts of Thailand, parts of Sri Lanka.'

'America is the biggest country in the world that purchases these tropical fish,' da Silva said, and it's an increasing problem. Da Silva told The Post that more than 400,000 are shipped into the United States. 'It was about not taking Nemo out of the sea, but the opposite happened.'Īccording to the Saving Nemo Conservation Fund, which da Silva helped found, more than 1 million clownfish are taken from reefs for home aquariums each year. 'I think it was a big surprise, because the message from the film was a very good one about conservation,' Karen Burke da Silva, associate professor in biodiversity and conservation at Flinders University in South Australia, told The Washington Post in a phone interview early Wednesday morning. Fans were so taken with the film's titular character, they decided to find their own Nemo(s). And with the success, sales of clownfish, which are often taken from the ocean, rose by as much as 40 percent, according to Hakai magazine. Pretty simple, right? The movie did well, too, making $936.7 million worldwide at the box office, according to IMBb. The movie ends - spoiler alert - with young Nemo finding his way out of the glass prison and back to his home. In the children's movie, the father of a young clownfish treks across the Pacific looking for his son, who has been fished out of the deep blue and dumped into an aquarium in a dentist's office. Finding the message of many films can be challenging, but the moral of 'Finding Nemo' seems pretty straightforward: Leave fish in the ocean, where they belong.

Film finding nemo