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clean·er fish
/ˈklēnər fiSH/noun
- 1. a small fish, especially a striped wrasse, that is permitted to remove parasites from the skin, gills, and mouth of larger fishes, to their mutual benefit.
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Cleaner fish are fish that show a specialist feeding strategy by providing a service to other species, referred to as clients, by removing dead skin, ectoparasites, and infected tissue from the surface or gill chambers.
Cleaner wrasses are the best-known of the cleaner fish. They live in a cleaning symbiosis with larger, often predatory, fish, grooming them and benefiting by consuming what they remove. "Client" fish congregate at wrasse "cleaning stations" and wait for the cleaner fish to remove gnathiid parasites, the cleaners even swimming into their open ...
The best known cleaning symbioses are among marine fishes, where several species of small fish, notably of wrasse, are specialised in colour, pattern and behaviour as cleaners, providing a cleaning and ectoparasite removal service to larger, often predatory fish.
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, and by their movement patterns. Cleaner wrasses greet visitors in an effort to secure the food source and cleaning opportunity with the client.
The Hawaiian cleaner wrasse or golden cleaner wrasse (Labroides phthirophagus), is a species of wrasse (genus Labroides) found in the waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands. The fish is endemic to Hawaii.
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 .
Cleaner shrimp. A Pacific cleaner shrimp, Lysmata amboinensis, cleans the mouth of a moray eel. Ancylomenes magnificus provides a manicure for a diver. Cleaner shrimp is a common name for a number of swimming decapod crustaceans that clean other organisms of parasites.
Labroides bicolor is a species of wrasse endemic to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. It is known by various names including bicolor cleanerfish, bicolor (ed) cleaner wrasse, cleaner wrasse, two-color cleaner wrasse and yellow diesel wrasse .
Some fish specialise as cleaner fish, and establish cleaning stations where other fish can come to have their parasites nibbled away. The "resident fish doctor and dentist on the reef is the bluestreak cleaner wrasse ". [23]
The crimson cleaner fish (Suezichthys aylingi), or butcher's dick in Australia, is a species of wrasse native to the southwestern Pacific Ocean around Australia and New Zealand. This species inhabits patches of sand on reefs at depths of from 6 to 100 metres (20 to 328 ft). It is a cleaner fish.