Incredible shrinking clownfish beats the heat

Pixar's Finding Nemo immortalized the colorful clownfish, with its distinctive orange body and white stripes, in the popular imagination. Clownfish, like many other species, are feeling the stress of rising temperatures and other environmental stressors. Fortunately, they have a superpower to cope: They can shrink their body size during dangerous heat waves to substantially boost their odds of survival, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. “This is not just about getting skinnier under stressful conditions; these fish are actually getting shorter," said co-author Melissa Versteeg, a graduate student at Newcastle University. "We don’t know yet exactly how they do it, but we do know that a few other animals can do this too." Many vertebrates have shown growth decline in response to environmental stressors, especially higher temperatures. Marine iguanas, for example, reabsorb some of their bone material to shrink when their watery habitat gets warmer, whil ... Read full article.