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A cleaning station is a location where aquatic life congregate to be cleaned by smaller beings. Such stations exist in both freshwater and marine environments, and are used by animals including fish, sea turtles and hippos.
Cleaning symbiosis is known from several groups of animals both in the sea and on land (see table). Cleaners include fish, shrimps and birds; clients include a much wider range of fish, marine reptiles including turtles and iguanas, octopus, whales, and terrestrial mammals.
There are two types of cleaner fish, obligate full time cleaners and facultative part time cleaners [1] where different strategies occur based on resources and local abundance of fish. [1] Cleaning behaviour takes place in pelagic waters as well as designated locations called cleaner stations. [8]
Every several feet, they close and clean their gill rakers for a few milliseconds (filter feeding). The fish all open their mouths and opercula wide at the same time (the red gills are visible in the photo below—click to enlarge). The fish swim in a grid where the distance between them is the same as the jump length of the copepods.
Bluestreak cleaner wrasses clean to consume ectoparasites on client fish for food. The bigger fish recognise them as cleaner fish because they have a lateral stripe along the length of their bodies, [9] and by their movement patterns.
Self-cleaning can sometimes be achieved if the fish stocks density is sufficiently high and the water level is sufficiently low. For example, if trout are stocked at 20 kilograms per cubic metre, they can keep the raceway unit clean by their swimming movements, preventing waste solids from settling to the raceway floor.