I recently came across
a research article (accessible pdf
here) which threw unexpected and fascinating light on an old underwater photo of mine. In
the observation, a pair of cleaner fishes are shown servicing a client parrotfish. What I didn’t realise before was that pairs are less likely to cheat than singletons, so clients get a better service and are more likely to come back. Between members of a pair, there appears to be a modified version of the prisoner’s dilemma operating.
I’m keen to identify other observations with a behaviour which needs some expanded understanding in order to interpret at a deeper level, hopefully with an accessible scientific source I could look at.
(But not elements which are simply missing from a photo, e.g. a scary shark off stage, nor “what happened next?”, e.g. shark enters stage left and carries the protagonists away.)
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The research article link doesn’t work. The observation link does work, and I see that the line below the original post records a number of views and one link.
Okay - the DOI wasn’t resolving itself by shorthand so I have put in longhand. Thanks for pointing this out.
This is
an observation of a little type of pufferfish called a Toby. Whilst I was reviewing my old underwater fish pictures for evidence of behaviour, I recalled that this diminutive little thing doesn’t tend to flee quite so fast as might be expected for its size when a threat appears. I suspect this is related to its skin toxicity.
This article notes that its main skin toxin (TTX) is exogenous, i.e. it is accumulated from its toxic food (e.g. starfish). The behaviours I find weird are that:
- it eats TTX-laden food without dying and,
- it seems to act as if it knows it is poisonous to predators.
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Who said swimming was easy?
And who’d have thought that large pufferfishes like this one I photographed 20 years ago were amongst the steadiest swimmers in the sea? Until I read a 2001 research article (accessible pdf here), I had thought quite the opposite.
It notes the six different ways a fish can end up recoiling when it tries to move: surging back and forth, heaving up and down, slipping side to side, yawing round and round, pitching head over tail, and rolling like a corkscrew. Most swimming gaits require their users to make significant compromises on some of these recoils in order to make any progress at all.
But (although the article focuses on boxfishes, which are related to puffers), it shows just how few compromises are needed when using their apparently bizarre fin arrangement in what is called the tetraodontiform gait.
A more recent article (accessible pdf here) even posits that some puffers literally puff water asymmetrically sideways out of their gill covers to act like fine trim controls to counter minute yaw variations. Wild.
