When you’re a small shrimp in the fish world, it pays to know how to dance.
The yellow-beaked cleaner shrimp perform a special ‘rocking dance’ to advertise their parasite cleaning services to host fish.
Dancing guarantees the tiny crustacean easy access to food, according to University of Queensland PhD student Justine Becker.
Ms Becker, from UQ’s School of Integrative Biology, has been researching the behaviour the cleaner shrimp for the last three years, spending nine months at the Lizard Island Research Station, north of Cairns.
These tiny shrimp remove parasites from more than 35 different species of reef fish such as coral trout, rock cod and sweetlip and will even move in and out of their mouth and gills without being eaten.
After diving with them in the wild and observing them in the laboratory, Ms Becker investigated why the shrimp performed the rocking dance which was a side-to-side motion.
“It appears as if they are signalling to potential client fish: ‘Hey I’m a cleaner’, come over and be cleaned”, Ms Becker said.
“They’ve even used the rocking dance for me a few times, so looking for dancing shrimp makes it easier to spot them as otherwise they are extremely difficult to find.”
The shrimp are about three centimetres long and transparent except for coloured spots and a bright yellow line along their body.
“This yellow provides a stark contrast against the blue background of the water and this combined with the rocking dance probably makes these shrimp highly visible to potential client fish.”
To confirm that the rocking dance was an advertising signal, Ms Becker did a series of experiments where she manipulated the shrimps’ hunger levels and exposed them to rock cods in the lab.
She found that hungry shrimp, which were more willing to clean than full shrimp, spent more time rocking, were approached more by client fish and were observed rocking closer to their clients than full shrimp.
She said her research backed the idea that unrelated organisms can communicate with each other via advertising signals.
Ms Becker was funded by an Australian Museum fellowship.
She was supervised by UQ staff, Coral Reef Ecologist and fish expert Dr Lexa Grutter, Behavioural Ecologist Associate Professor Anne Goldizen and helped by research assistant Ms Lynda Curtis.
Media: contact Ms Becker (phone: 07 3365 4489, 0402 277 433, email: jbecker@sols.uq.edu.au) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (phone: 07 3365 2619, email: m.holland@uq.edu.au)
