A clownfish’s last stand

Twenty years ago, scientist and Mongabay board member Debby Ng joined a team documenting life at Terumbu Bayan, a coral reef south of Singapore that was about to be reclaimed. There she encountered a pair of false clownfish living in an anemone. The mother was unusually aggressive, even for a species known to be feisty. She repeatedly charged Debby, a diver thousands of times her size, biting her several times. Then Debby saw what she was protecting: a brood of eggs. She could already see tiny eyes through the thin membranes. Eyes of the brood of false clown anemonefish. Photographed by Debby Ng in 2006. Soon an alarm sounded, calling Debby and the other scientists out of the water. From the dive boat, they watched the first barges tip rock and fill directly into the channel, sending a plume of sediment through the shallows where they’d been swimming minutes earlier. The team had salvaged some of the hard corals and a tiger-tail seahorse, but there was only so much they could move. The smaller animals, including shrimp and nudibranchs, had to be left behind along with topshells that sat in crevices and cowries with eggs attached to the reef. Debby still remembers that clownfish. False clown anemonefish parents. Photo by Debby Ng. I first wrote about the dive last year in Requiem for a Clownfish. It resurfaced for me recently after The Woke Salaryman adapted the account into a comic. In August, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced that several islands…This article was originally published on

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