Finding Nemo

A clown fish named Marlin living in the Great Barrier Reef loses his son, Nemo, after he ventures into the open sea, despite his father's constant warnings about many of the ocean's dangers. Nemo is abducted by a boat and netted up and sent to a dentist's office in Sydney. So, while Marlin ventures off to try to retrieve Nemo, Marlin meets a fish named Dory, a blue tang suffering from short-term memory loss. The companions travel a great distance, encountering various dangerous sea creatures such as sharks, anglerfish and jellyfish, in order to rescue Nemo from the dentist's office, which is situated by Sydney Harbor. While the two are doing this, Nemo and the other sea animals in the dentist's fish tank plot a way to return to Sydney Harbor to live their lives free again.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the seven wonders of the natural world, and pulling away from it, and viewing it from a greater distance, you can understand why. It is larger than the Great Wall of China and the only living thing on earth visible from space.


The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queenslandin north-east Australia.A large part of the reef is protected by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which helps to limit the impact of human use, such as fishing and tourism. Other environmental pressures on the reef and its ecosystem include runoff, climate change accompanied by mass coral bleaching, and cyclic population outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish.

The Great Barrier Reef has long been known to and used by theAboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and is an important part of local groups' cultures and spirituality. The reef is a very popular destination for tourists, especially in theWhitsunday Islands and Cairns regions. Tourism is an important economic activity for the region, generating A$ 1 billion per year.

Environmental threats:

Climate change, pollution, crown-of-thorns starfish and fishing are the primary threats to the health of this reef system. Other threats include shipping accidents, oil spills, and tropical cyclones. 

The Great Barrier Reef is home to approximately:
1,500 species of fish
360 species of hard coral
1/3 of the world’s soft corals
4,000 species of molluscs (eg. shells)
800 species of echinoderm (eg. starfish, sea urchins etc)
24 species of seabirds that live and breed on the islands
More than 30 species of marine mammals including whales, dolphins and dugongs
14,000 dugong (Australia’s entire dugong population is about 100,000)
6 species of marine turtles, all listed as threatened.

There are three main types of reefs found on the Great Barrier Reef: Ribbon, Platform, and Fringing reefs.
Fringing reefs are coral structures that are attached to the mainland or to continental islands. In the Great Barrier Reef most fringing reefs are found around islands. Fringing reefs are probably the reef type most commonly seen by visitors.

Platform reefs are also known as patch reefs and are scattered in the calm, shallow waters between the mainland and edge of the continental shelf. They are usually round or oval patches and often tend to be broken up.

Ribbon reefs only occur in the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef. They form along the edge of the continental shelf and can grow so high they form narrow walls.

Tiny masses of coral polyps are responsible for building coral reefs.
Reefs are masses of limestone made from skeletons of millions upon millions of tiny marine animals and plants.

It is not one long continuous reef, but a complex system of various marine habitats with more than:
2900 coral reefs
600 continental islands
300 coral cays