klausi
Contributor
I’m always excited to have the chance to film fish behavior. Here a Blue-spotted puffer fish (Arothron caeruleopunctatus) is pesked by a sharksucker (Echeneis naucrates), a hydrodynamic parasite which attaches itself to other fishes in order to save energy for swimming. The puffer fish jerked and turned to get rid of the sharksucker, but to no avail.
The sharksucker seems to remove crustacean parasites from its host fishes, and this would make the interaction at least partially a mutualistic symbiosis. Given the behavior of the puffer fish, it seems to consider the sharksucker a parasite, though.
Another point is that the sharksucker is not sucking onto a shark – while I shot this footage in a marine protected area, sharks are by now very rare in this part of the Philippines, and the sharksucker has to go with alternative hosts.
The sharksucker seems to remove crustacean parasites from its host fishes, and this would make the interaction at least partially a mutualistic symbiosis. Given the behavior of the puffer fish, it seems to consider the sharksucker a parasite, though.
Another point is that the sharksucker is not sucking onto a shark – while I shot this footage in a marine protected area, sharks are by now very rare in this part of the Philippines, and the sharksucker has to go with alternative hosts.
