Excellent Swimmer, Great Personality

[crowplus]

FYI:
Fish may be smarter than you think. When stuck on an angler’s line, striped bass have been known to wrap the line around a rock to shear it when the fisherman reels it in. Octopi and squid have been taught to open jars. Now a BU biologist says our piscine friends don’t just have brains; they have personality.

http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/web/swimmer/

[CaptnJack]

Funny, some of the questions he's asking have been answered already maybe 20 years ago for terrestrial species. Most of the roaming behavior can come down to some form of density depedence. When food is plentiful its fine to sit on your anemone, when food is scarce its better to go looking for it predators be damned. Both traits are maintained in the population as during some periods site fidelity is selected for and at other times/years roaming boldness is selected for. Same thing arises with mating, when neighbors are common you don't need to go far from you anemone to find one. So you can imagine a high denisty of clownfish, easy mating opportunities but low food resources. So the mating and food variables actually work opposite one another when it comes to roaming behavior.
They are cute.

[LCF]

I don't know; by the time we finished our trip to Indonesia, everybody had been banged in the mask or bitten enough that we no longer thought the clownfish were cute. In fact, the unanimous verdict was that Nemo deserved the dentist's office.

[ktb]

I don't know; by the time we finished our trip to Indonesia, everybody had been banged in the mask or bitten enough that we no longer thought the clownfish were cute. In fact, the unanimous verdict was that Nemo deserved the dentist's office.

Ok, that's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.