By Jonathan Smith, Producer of Blue Planet II

We wanted to tell a story of seasonal change in One Ocean and to show how small changes in temperature can have a big influence on marine life in the seasonal seas. Around the same time our team had shown me images of a full-grown male kobudai and I remember looking at the images with my series producer, Mark Brownlow and us both wondering “it is an incredible and unusual fish, but does it do anything?”

Our team then began to investigate and discovered that a rise in sea temperature triggers the males to engage in territorial battles over the right to spawn, and more interestingly, that all the big males that fight were once females.

Having studied marine biology it was no surprise to me that kobudai change their sex. After all it is a member of the wrasse family who are well known to exhibit sequential hermaphroditism, meaning that for them sex change at some point in their life is a normal biological process generally to aid reproductive success. In fact, sex change is a very common reproductive strategy in many fish. Some, like the wrasse tend to change from female to male whereas others, such as clownfish tend to change from male to female and some fish species, it’s thought, can potentially switch sex multiple times.