Hooligan Fish

One way to loose all credibility and intellectual respect from me is to call a damselfish symbiotically associated with an anemone a “Nemo”. It works like that:

Pacificklaus: How are you?

Diver whom Pacificklaus takes seriously: Good, I just came back from a dive!

Pacificklaus: What did you see during your dive?

Bimbo-Diver: Nemo!

Pacificklaus (rolls eyes)

“Nemo” is a character in a cheesy commercial cartoon movie for kids. It’s not the name of a fish, or group of fishes. What Bimbo-diver means is a damsel fish – or pomacentrid – living in symbiosis with an anemone. Damselfishes (Pomacentridae) are a rather big family of small bony fishes, some of which tend to algae gardens which they graze on, and others live in the aforementioned anemones for protection. Many damselfishes also tend to their eggs and some even to their fry. These are all behaviors which make them very territorial marine animals.

Why do I write Damselfishes (Pomacentridae)? “Pomacentridae” is the scientific, universally accepted name for this fish family. “Damselfishes” is the common name in English. Every language from a place where people know about the Pomacentridae has a local word for them. This word often describes the nature of the animal: a woodpecker is a bird which pecks away at wood. An earthworm is a worm crawling trough the earth. Ect! That brings us to the “damsel” fish. A damsel is a “young unmarried woman”. A delicate creature. Maybe given to poetry and romantic walks, but not to violent aggression. The fishes belonging to the pomacentridae do not act like damsels. They are super aggressive, territorial and combative. I have been bitten by pomacentridae, head butted, and chased over the reef. They are especially aggressive when divers swim near their anemones or algae-gardens, which they consider their property, without any discussion possible. Naturally, they are even more amped up when they are breeding and have eggs to defend. Last week a damselfish saw me and swam over a good 5 meters from its anemone just to threateningly swim back and forth in front of me.

The only good thing is that they are small fishes. A 90 cm “damsel” fish would be something to hide behind a rock from! A 2 meter damselfish I would not want to be in the water with!

Now, who else starts unprovoked fights, headbutts and bites? The European soccer hooligan (Assholis europaeicus). Wikipedia writes of “norms that tolerate great levels of violence and territoriality”. The parallels are too strong to ignore, hence I propose to change the common name for the family of the Pomacentridae to “hooligan fish” (and certainly not nemo).