There are beautiful, well-made films that even convey interesting ideas , and even greater environmental awareness. However, the world is complex and intricate, and a movie-inspired craze can lead to an unwanted side effect.
This was the case with the Pixar film Finding Nemo , which recorded what happens when we end up releasing our pets into the environment: we cause serious imbalances in the ecosystem.
Invasive species
In the movie Finding Nemo there is a scene in which two fish escape down the toilet drain. Many children, watching the movie, imitated this example and I want to do a good deed, flushing the fish down the toilet so that they were free. However, this was a problem, as JM Mulet explains in his book Real Ecologismo :
Most home aquariums are exotic or tropical species, which are very showy but tend to die in cold waters. The problem is that the film was also seen in Florida, so in the Caribbean right now there are colonies of scorpionfish, originally from Asia, that are causing real havoc.
And more bad news: because it lacks the genetic ability to adapt to rapid changes in its environment, such as those derived from current global warming, the clownfish popularized by the movie Finding Nemo is going to become hopelessly extinct. This is what the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers conclude in a recent study published in the journal Ecology Letters. Although that, fortunately, is not to blame Finding Nemo .