If you watched Finding Nemo (who hasn’t?), you may remember Nemo’s home in the beautiful pink sea anemone with its tentacles waving around. These tentacles are able to sting and eat fish, crabs, and sometimes even birds. Lucky for Nemo, clownfish have a mucus coat that protects them from the sea anemone’s poisonous stings. And lucky for the sea anemone, clownfish protect them from being consumed by other fish and provide them nutrients through their food and fecal droppings. Nemo and his fellow clownfish, however, can’t shield these sedentary sea animals from nearly invisible plastic microfibers or plastic preproduction pellets, called nurdles. At Duke University I have been studying one specific species of sea anemone, Aiptasia pallida, which seems to find plastic particularly tasty. My work is part of a larger wave of scientific research around the world looking into how and why sea animals are eating microplastics and how it may impact their health.