Odds and Ends

Today I thought I'd give a little lecture on the anemone fish (a.k.a. clownfish, or Nemo). As I'm sure you know, Finding Nemo is an extremely popular Pixar film about fish on the Great Barrier Reef. As a result, tourists on the Reef have an obsession with finding anemone fish (I have seen many of them, and they're pretty cute). Finding Nemo is one of the greatest advertising ploys for ecotourism out there. But I digress. In the movie, Marlin's wife, Coral, dies or gets eaten or something, so Marlin is left to raise Nemo alone. How sad. Well, Pixar really didn't do their research on this one. Here's what would actually have happened, biologically speaking… Coral, the large, female fish, would die. Sad, but it happens. What Pixar didn't account for is that anemone fish are protandrous. In laymen's terms, this means that they are hermaphrodites whose male sex organs mature before their female organs. In clownfish, this maturation occurs only after the large, dominant female fish dies and needs to be replaced by the smaller male. Basically, when Coral died Marlin would have become a girl, and Nemo would have become the new breeding male. Sort of a raunchy tale of incestuous fish, if you ask me. Is this really appropriate for children?

I must also address the issue of Foster's Lager, as people continue to mention it to me. I have seen neither hide nor hair of Foster's during my time in Australia. I'm sure it's around somewhere, but it's certainly not ubiquitous. There is a Queensland beer called XXXX (Four X), however, that's quite common around here. The big joke is that Queenslanders are too dumb to spell beer, so they just put XXXX on the can instead. XXXX Bitter has an ad campaign claiming that it's a "Man in a Can." Oy.