Egypt

Who would have thought that a father and

abducted son could make such an impact on our lives. The story of the Hollywood Pixar movie Finding Nemo so touched everyone, it became the biggest-selling DVD of all time. However, the lives of these (almost) comical and colourful fish is indeed stranger than the fictionalised story behind the movie.

We are all now well acquainted with the anemonefish, with our closest encounters to be found in the Red Sea, thankfully now back on the diving menu after the lifting of COVID-19 travel restrictions. Being only a four-hour flight away from mainland Europe, the Red Sea is the closest tropical coral reef ecosystem available to us. The Red Sea anemonefish (Amphiprion bicinctus) is more commonly known to us as the clownfish and it is this remarkable little damselfish that so steals our hearts on almost every dive in the Red Sea.

These clownfish are so obvious to us snorkellers and divers, not only because of their amazing flamboyant colours of orange/red overall, plus a couple of iridescent blue/white stripes which wrap the upper body, they also live exclusively within the grasp of an anemone’s tentacles. Anemones (as we all know) have stinging cells, called nematocysts, within their tentacles to snare any passing food bits, yet the clownfish manage to live their entire lives within this sticky embrace and manage to appear invincible to the deadly stinging cells of their host.

It has taken various marine scientists many years of intense study to work out this relationship between the anemone and its clownfish and it is found that their relationship is entirely mutualistic, with both partners benefitting from the association. We know that clownfish help to protect their anemone by attacking any possible threats to their host (and that includes us divers), with clownfish readily leaving their protective host and swimming many metres into open waters to ward off anything and everybody. This is doubly so when the clownfish have laid their eggs under the skirt of the anemone and within the range of their tentacles. The clownfish also helps to ‘clean up’ debris from the feeding anemone, and also eats the anemone’s faecal matter.

The most obvious of the relationship is the fact that the clownfish are not stung and ingested by their host. The clownfish appear to keep in almost constant contact to their host and continuously swim amid the tentacles and even the mouth, coating themselves in the anemone’s protective mucus, thus rendering them effectively ‘invisible’ to the anemone’s toxins and stinging cells. Once the clownfish’s eggs are laid and fertilised, it is the male that cares for the brood by blowing fresh water over the eggs and removing any dead or diseased cells. Even the newborn hatchlings spend some small time amid the anemone’s tentacles before leaving the nest and finding (perhaps) their own anemone to start the cycle all over again.

There are few predators while the clownfish is within the range of the anemone, but are prone to incidental attack if they venture too far, but they are prey to isopods such as species of the Cymothidae family, which attach themselves to the heads of the clownfish (as well as many other species), where they do little harm, rather than some skeletal deformities as they are scavengers, rather than parasites.

Clownfish are able to reproduce all year and depending on the water temperature and constant current of the water, they can often form huge colonies with dozens of anemones and perhaps hundreds of clownfish, living alongside another damselfish, the juvenile three-spot damselfish (Dascyllus trimaculatus), which co-habit the anemones, and are usually in much greater numbers than the clownfish.

In the Red Sea, two of the most obvious of these super colonies are the Anemone Gardens at Ras Mohammed at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula and Anemone City on Panorama Reef to the south of Marsa Alam, down Egypt’s African mainland. Other lovely small colonies can be found at El Quseir, Gubal and Tawila that are rarely, if ever dived, due to the heady excesses of other more popular dives nearby. If you look closely at the anemones, you will also find that they are inhabited by various species of small shrimps and even crabs and depending on the anemone species, there may be several species of shrimps co-habiting with the clownfish and three-spot Dascyllus. There is a similar-looking fish to the clownfish and can sometimes be confused, but this species lives on table corals and will certainly be killed if it touches an anemone.

This is the citron or lemon coral goby (Gobiodon citrinus), which is an overall lemon yellow in colour with iridescent thin blue lines around the head and at the base of the dorsal fin.

Clownfish are relatively common in all tropical oceans, yet there are only 29 different species worldwide and perhaps around only a dozen host anemones. The greater number of different species can be found within the Coral Triangle in Indonesia

A clownfish is born male and has the ability to change into a female. This can happen when the dominant female dies, the dominant male will turn into a female and then choose to mate with another male in the group. However, once they change they cannot turn back.

The Red Sea ANEMONEFISH

As the Egyptian Red Sea opens up from COVID-19 restrictions for UK divers, many will be excitedly awaiting their first glimpse of that ubiquitous reef inhabitant, the anemonefish

Photographs by Lawson Wood

Clownfish are omnivores. They eat dead anemone tentacles, leftovers from the anemone, plankton, mollusk, zooplankton, phytoplankton, small crustaceans and various algae.

Clownfish are relatively common in all tropical oceans, yet there are only 29 different species worldwide and perhaps around only a dozen host anemones. The greater number of different species can be found within the Coral Triangle in Indonesia, and the Red Sea to the extreme northwest has managed to snare only one species which is regarded as endemic to the region, but some are gradually making their way into the Gulf of Aden and the greater Arabian Sea. Curiously, the German marine scientist Hans Fricke wrote about the skunk anemonefish (Amphiprion akallopisos) in the Red Sea and described the hierarchy between the males and females and how (unlike most other fish species) start off as males when young and if there is no dominant female, one of the males will change sex to female and rule her harem of males! What is curious to me is that this species of clownfish does not exist in the northern Red Sea (to my knowledge), so perhaps their work was in the extreme south. Nevertheless, their observations stand firm and true for all species of anemonefish. On reflection, I am sure that their discovery and description of the skunk clownfish is correct, as back

Once the clownfish’s eggs are laid and fertilised, it is the male that cares for the brood by blowing fresh water over the eggs and removing any dead or diseased cells

Threespot Dascyllus

in 1999, up on Woodhouse Reef in the Straits of Tiran in the northern Red Sea, I photographed the Oman anemonefish (Amphiprion omanensis). Originally I had thought that this little clownfish was actually a melanistic (or dark) colour form of the Red Sea anemonefish, but on examining the early photographs, they are quite clearly of a clownfish that I had never imagined finding in the northern Red Sea, and to my knowledge this is a first record for this clownfish in the northern Red Sea. So, if anyone out there has photographed these or other species of clownfish in the Red Sea, please let me know!

With clownfish found on virtually every reef dive that we have in the Red Sea, one would think that this flamboyant little fish would have come to the fore of all the naturalists who had been exploring the Red Sea since the early 1800s.

Amazingly, the species is only known to us since it was first discovered and described in 1830, when a couple of specimens were collected and kept in a bucket of seawater! The Red Sea anemonefish is endemic to the Red Sea, but is gradually spreading out into the Arabian Sea and down the west coast of Africa.

My first-ever trip to the Red Sea was back in 1973 and armed with my trusty Nikonos II, I joined Dr Paul Cragg and a number of other BSOUP photographers (including Jim Wilmot, Kevin Cullimore, Pete Bignall and my great dive buddy Harry Simmonds, as well as other marine life enthusiasts) to explore the Red Sea for the first time. Many trips later after having run dive safaris through the Sinai out of Eilat, I went to live and work in the Red Sea in the mid-1980s for four years working on the legendary Lady Jenny III and Lady Jenny V, exploring reefs and wrecks that had never been seen before (some have never been dived since!) and have photographed these little fish everywhere. My love for the clownfish in the Red Sea has never diminished. n

Citron goby

Lawson Wood on a Red Sea liveaboard

What’s in a name?

All marine species have a common name and a proper (Latin) name. Common names can change from region to region, never mind country to country, hence the use of proper scientific names to remove this confusion. As we can see with the naming of the Red Sea anemonefish, two-striped anemonefish, two striped clownfish, clownfish or Red Sea clownfish, you should be trying to describe the same fish, but thankfully the full Scientific Classification is on hand to properly describe its place in the hierarchy of all living things, including who first described the fish, back in 1830 - the zoological scientist and geographer Eduard Rüppell from the Senckenberg Research Society and Museum in Frankfurt.

Scientific Classification

Kingdom: Animalia | Phylum: Chordata Class: Actinopterygii | Order: Perciformes Family: Pomacentridae | Genus: Amphiprion Species: A. bicinctus Binomial name: Amphiprion bicinctus, Rüppell, 1830