The breeding male then “suppresses maturation of juveniles in the anemone, so they are unable to compete with him for the one female,” explains Hardt. For the transitioning male, the testes dissolve and ovaries form. Hardt, Ph.D., founder and CEO of OceanInk, and author of Sex in the Sea. The biological change inside the fish is governed by hormonal changes-chemical shifts that trigger a complex and cascading effect,” says Marah J. When the female dies, the breeding male will get first choice of food and begin to gain weight, eventually becoming female. The rest of the community are made up of sexually immature males. She mates only with the breeding male, usually the second-largest and most aggressive male in the community. In the female-dominated clownfish community, the female is the largest fish. In fact, about 2 percent of fish species display some kind of hermaphroditism, or roughly 500 different species worldwide.Ĭlownfish carry both female and male reproductive organs. The mangrove killifish is both male and female it self-fertilizes for its entire reproductive life. Not all marine sequential hermaphrodites begin life as males moon wrasses in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, for example, all start off as females and become males, and some fish, such as Asian sheepshead wrasse, spend a number of years as one sex (Asian sheepshead wrasses are born female) and then switch gender. For scuba divers, perhaps the most identifiable (and beloved) undersea hermaphrodite is the clownfish, which is born exclusively male. Hundreds of species of fish undergo this biological process, which is a kind of sexual transition. To understand what Finding Nemo got wrong, you have to understand sequential hermaphroditism. Wait, what? The Process of Sequential Hermaphroditism If your knowledge about clownfish is mostly gleaned from watching the movie Finding Nemo, you may be surprised to learn that Marlin should have been a female and Nemo, the energetic and adorable title character, should have been his mate.
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