The unusual behavior of cleaner fish has attracted both popular and scientific curiosity since its discovery early in the 20th century. These fish apparently make their living by removing external parasites from “host” fishes of other species (some also remove bacteria or diseased and injured tissue). When they approach cleaners, hosts assume an unusual motionless posture that allows cleaners to feed from their scales, from their gill cavities, or even inside their mouths. For their trouble, cleaner fish get a meal, and hosts get a good cleaning. The interaction between cleaner fish and their hosts is generally classified as a mutualism, or mutually beneficial interaction between species. Stories about this and other mutualisms have become staples of nature documentaries and the popular literature and have helped lure many students into a lifetime of studying biology. From the perspective of evolutionary ecology, however, the cleaner-host relationship is anything but straightforward (Poulin and Grutter 1996). First, it is not at all clear that this interaction confers reciprocal fitness benefits. Despite several decades of effort, only one study has shown that cleaners significantly reduce hosts’ parasite loads (Grutter 1999), and none has yet demonstrated that reducing parasite loads increases host success. Since cleaners often gouge the host’s flesh, particularly when parasites are few, the interaction is often more costly than beneficial. Second, if cleaning does not confer an advantage, it is not evident why hosts should tolerate and even actively solicit cleaners’ attention. In fact, sometimes hosts lure cleaners only to eat them, but the conditions under which it might be beneficial for a host to doublecross its cleaners like this remain unexplored. Third, we don’t really understand how cleaning behaviors arose in the first place, considering that the first individuals that approached hosts to feed on parasites were very likely eaten. Despite this constraint, cleaning has apparently evolved multiple times; it is found in at least five families, in both marine and freshwater species, and in both the temperate zone and the tropics.
Evolutionary ecology of Datura stramonium: equal plant fitness benefits of growth and resistance against herbivory