IIOBSON: CLEANING SYMBIOSIS 



CLEANING ACTIVITY OF THE 

 SHARPNOSE SEAPERCH 



Unlike senoritas, which clean as adults as well 

 as juveniles, all of the sharpnose seaperch that I 

 observed cleaning were juveniles less than about 

 125 mm long-. Occasionally noncleaning sea- 

 perch swim in groujis of 15 or more, but those 

 seen cleaning were always solitary, or in groups 

 of two or three. In agreement with senoritas, 

 cleaning seaperch do not establish well-defined 

 cleaning stations, but instead may clean other 

 fish at any point as they move from place to 

 place. I found no evidence that fishes which 

 are residents of other areas come to where sea- 

 perch are located for cleaning; rather, cleaning 

 seaperch occur where resident fishes are nu- 

 merous. As is true of seiioritas, seaperch use 

 the same picking technique to clean material 

 from the bodies of other fish that they use to 

 take small organisms from a benthic substrate. 

 Clearly bottom-picking can be preadaptive to 

 cleaning. Cleaning by seaiierch, as by seiioritas, 

 usually occurs within 3 m of the substrate. How- 

 ever, there is little overlap in the cleaning areas 

 of the two species: generally seaperch clean at 

 greater depths and or in colder water than 

 senoritas, where limited observations indi- 

 cate they may ]iredominate as cleaners even 

 when senoritas are more abundant. Data 

 illustrating this distribution of cleaning activ- 

 ity at a point in time were obtained at the 

 20- to 25-m and 30- to 3.5-m locations off 

 La JoUa, where the two species co-occur 



Table 4. — Number of bouts in which sharpnose seaperch 

 and senoritas, respectively, were seen cleaning other 

 fishes during 1.5-niin observation periods at the 20- to 

 25-m and 30- to 35-m locations off La Jolla. Two obser- 

 vation periods, one at each location, and never more than 

 45 min apart, were made on each of the dates indicated. 



(Table 4) . Despite the fact that senoritas were 

 observed to be far more numerous than perch 

 throughout the depth range of this study 

 (3-50 m), seaiierch performed almost all 

 the cleaning observed at the 30- to 35-m lo- 

 cation, where cleaning by the much more 

 abundant seiiorita was limited to a few isolated 

 instances. 



A measure of the incidence of cleaning indi- 

 viduals within the population of juvenile sharp- 

 nose seaperch was obtained during 39 observa- 

 tion periods at the 20- to 25-m and 30- to 35-m 

 locations at La Jolla. These observations, to- 

 taling more than 26 hr, were made from Sep- 

 tember 1968 to February 1969. During this 

 period, 201 juvenile seaperch were seen, of which 

 105, over 52 Sf , were cleaning other fishes. Thus 

 it appears that at least most sharpnose seaperch 

 are cleaners when they are juveniles, whereas 

 only a small minority of the seiiorita population 

 seem to be cleaners. 



Fishes Cleaned by the Sharpnose Seaperch 



Because sharpnose seaperch were observed 

 only at depths lielow 20 m, substantially less data 

 are available on their cleaning activity than on 

 that of seiioritas. Of the 105 seaperch observed 

 cleaning during the 39 observation periods re- 

 ported above, all but one were cleaning black- 

 smiths; the lone exception was cleaning a soli- 

 tary blue rockfish, Sebastes mystimis. On two 

 other occasions, I saw sharpnose seaperch clean- 

 ing rubberli)! jierch, but otherwise the only fish 

 seen being cleaned have been blacksmiths (Fig- 

 ure 10). Undoubtedly additional observations, 

 especially in other areas, would expand this list. 

 I observed seiioritas cleaning in many different 

 areas, but my observations of cleaning seaperch 

 are limited to La Jolla. Clarke et al. (1967) 

 saw a sharpnose seaperch cleaning a rockfish at 

 1.50 m oflf La Jolla, and Gotshall (1967) reported 

 what he believed to be this species cleaning Mola 

 mola off Monterey. Yet no matter how many 

 different species the seaperch may in fact clean, 

 there seems no doubt that blacksmiths are prime 

 recipients in southern California, at least in 

 depths shallow^er than 35 m. 



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