CAMBRIDGE, MD. - Under ideal conditions, a single clownfish -- star of the movie "Finding Nemo" -- can lay enough eggs to produce more than 500 minuscule, wriggling hatchlings.

So when researchers at a University of Maryland lab started breeding clownfish in captivity, it was easy to see that they were not creating ideal conditions. Their first six or more months of effort, funded by thousands in federal grant money, produced two juvenile fish.

"Those fish were probably worth about $10,000 apiece," given all the time and money spent to produce them, joked Andrew M. Lazur, a professor at the Horn Point Laboratory on the Eastern Shore, part of the university's Center for Environmental Science.

More than a year later, things have improved. Experiments to mass-produce clownfish have produced a laboratory full of thousands of orange and white Nemo look-alikes.

Though half of the clownfish bought in the U.S. are raised in captivity (a higher percentage than for other tropical aquarium fish), half are plucked from the wild, according to John Brandt, North America director for the Marine Aquarium Council.

Conserving wild fish is one reason researchers at the University of Maryland are trying to perfect techniques for raising clownfish in captivity.

Because a clownfish smaller than a poker chip can bring $6 or more wholesale, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has given the two institutions more than $150,000 in grants to find ways to make raising the fish easier.

At the Horn Point lab, the first job was raising the fish. At first, the clownfish there would lay eggs, but the eggs often wouldn't hatch. That was solved by making the parent fish's diet more nutritious and changing the temperature and type of salt in the water. Now, often more than 75 percent of the young survive, researchers say.

One lesson the scientists already knew: Clownfish are good at protecting eggs but terrible at parenting. After the eggs are laid in the tank, the male clownfish guard them constantly.

But when the young hatch, the parents often eat them, a problem solved by moving the eggs from the parents' tank.

Another problem was color. Clownfish that are fed regular fish food often turn the color of a yellow highlighter. But customers don't want yellow clownfish, so researchers experimented with their food, adding a natural pigment found in plankton.

The result: a perfect Nemo orange.