Duplicated movie will not 'removeMovieClip'

[Calington]

It's actually the root movie that won't go away. All duplicated 'enemies' explode, but the root character will not die. Here's enemy code:

onClipEvent(load) {
this._x-=random(150);
moveSpeed=random(3)+2;
}

onClipEvent(enterFrame) {
this._x-=moveSpeed;
if(random(11)==4) {
this.gotoAndPlay(7);
}
}

and the control that duplicates it:

for (i=1; i<=3; i++){
fish.duplicateMovieClip( "fish"+i, i+100 );
}
stop();

Also the game is posted on my site for preview purposes:

http://calingtondesigns.com/game.htm

Probably something simple, but it's had me stumped for a long time.

[catbert303]

removeMovieClip only works on clips created with a depth >= 0,

since clips created by hand in the flash authoring program are assigned to negative depths in order to remove one of these clips with removeMovieClip you need to first use swapDepths on it,

fish.swapDepths(9999); // move to a positive depth
fish.removeMovieClip(); // now it can be removed