Fish and Wildlife Service only regulates imports of certain species of interest-ones that are endangered or threatened, for example. In the early 2000s, for example, the United National Environment Programme asked commercial fish-capture outfits for voluntary submissions on their catches, and got about what you’d expect: a smattering of responses, from only willing participants.* There was no way to check the data.

“There have been some efforts to ask and answer these questions, but not at a level where you would be confident in the data,” Rhyne says. and, perhaps eventually, the whole trade worldwide. The goal is a lofty one: catalog and track every ornamental fish imported to the U.S. He and Michael Tlusty, director of ocean sustainability science at the New England Aquarium in Boston, launched last June. “There was a lot of speculation after Finding Nemo, but no one can say what exactly is happening, because nobody’s looking at this trade,” says Andrew Rhyne, an associate professor of marine biology at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. The fish, one of the top six or seven ornamental imports, come from commercial aquaculture facilities that have been around for more than 40 years. The thing about clownfish is that, unlike most other pretty fish that adorn our home aquariums, many of them sold to consumers aren’t pulled from their native tropical habitats. We’ve all read about how demand for clownfish spiked in the wake of Finding Nemo-who wouldn’t want to bring home a live Disney character as a pet?-and about the ensuing global pillaging of coral reefs that ensued. But our understanding of where they’re coming from, how many of them are being harvested, and where they’re going, is murky at best. These aren’t fish we eat they’re the bright beauties we plop in tanks as decorations. imports roughly 7-million-to-10-million ornamental fish each year, accounting for about half of the roughly 18-million-to-25-million annually traded worldwide. If Finding Nemo is any indicator, we can surmise that the sequence of events surrounding the sequel, Finding Dory, which hits movie theaters today to rave reviews, will go something like this: hundreds of thousands of people will pack into cinemas around the country this weekend, then an inspired portion of them will promptly click around the web to see how they can get their hands on a blue tang, the popular tropical fish portrayed by the film’s title character.

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