More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 13 - May 25, 2025
Cleaner animals, by the way, tend to distinguish themselves in this realm. Cleaners have a fine-grained engagement with their surroundings, as they are dealing with the most complex of all environmental factors, other agents. The “mirror test” is a test used to work out whether an animal can recognize itself in a mirror as itself, for example by grooming or cleaning a spot on its body that can only be seen in the mirror. Very few animals pass this test. The only animal reported to pass a version of it, so far, that is not a mammal or a bird (and only very few of those pass it) is a cleaner
...more
During this period I read more about these shrimp. I learned that they are long-lived, territorial, and monogamous—mating for life. In aquarium settings they are listed as living for as much as five years. Banded shrimp can also recognize each other as individuals. In an old study from the 1970s, mated pairs were separated for a night or two and then reunited, and compared with shrimp who were separated from their mate and returned to another individual, a stranger. The strangers were of similar size and appearance to the lost mate (as far as humans could tell), as well as being of the same
...more
Cleaners often take a bite of the “client” itself at the end of the cleaning, and I described what looked like a situation of this kind at a shark cleaning station earlier in this chapter. If a cleaner takes too big a bite, that is cheating on the arrangement, but small bites are OK. At cleaning stations, there is often a queue of fish, or at least others around, waiting their turn to be cleaned. One kind of cleaner fish tends to cheat less if there are onlookers, and cheat more if there are not. Individual fish seem to be tending to their reputation. And onlooking clients do indeed avoid
...more
