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The cleaning process includes, but isn't limited to, the removal of parasites (both externally and internally) and dead skin from the client's body, and is performed by various smaller animals including cleaner shrimp and numerous species of cleaner fish, especially wrasses and gobies (Elacatinus spp).
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.
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.
In temperate regions, drifting kelp fields harbour cleaner wrasses and other fish which remove parasites from the skin of visiting sunfish. In the tropics, the mola will solicit cleaner help from reef fishes. By basking on its side at the surface, the sunfish also allows seabirds to feed on parasites from their skin.
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.
"Client" fish congregate at wrasse "cleaning stations" and wait for the cleaner fish to remove gnathiid parasites, the cleaners even swimming into their open mouths and gill cavities to do so. A single wrasse works for around four hours a day and in that time can inspect more than 2,000 clients.
Fish response to danger is largely classified into fight-or-flight or freezing. However, Elacatinus follows neither. It engages in cleaning interactions with potential predators sooner than with nonpredatory clients, treating them almost as soon as they arrive at their cleaning stations.
Greg Wohlford, Erie Times-News. May 2, 2024 at 8:28 AM. Now you have another place to put those fish guts. A new fish cleaning station is open at Lampe Marina for fishermen and women, 24 hours a ...
The fish is endemic to Hawaii. These cleaner fish inhabit coral reefs, setting up a territory referred to as a cleaning station. They obtain a diet of small crustacean parasites by removing them from other reef fish in a cleaning symbiosis.
These gobiids, known as "cleaner gobies", remove parasites from the skin, fins, mouth, and gills of a wide variety of large fish. The most remarkable aspect of this symbiosis is many of the fish that visit the cleaner gobies' cleaning stations would otherwise treat such small fish as food (for example, groupers and snapper ).