Meeting Abstract
Cleaner shrimp live on coral reefs and provide cleaning services to client fish by removing and eating ectoparasites. However, how they detect and recognize clients and decide to engage in cleaning behavior is unknown. Our previous research has shown that cleaner shrimp vision is likely monochromatic and that their spatial acuity is too coarse to resolve the color patterns of their reef fish clients. Here, we ask whether or not cleaner shrimp will solicit and engage in cleaning behavior based only on cues or signals perceived using their low-resolution visual system. First, we recorded footage in nature of cleaner shrimp in the genera Ancylomenes and Lysmata to create an ethogram of the behaviors they exhibit in the presence of clients. In the lab, we then exposed shrimp to synthetic “client fish” stimuli (solid black or white rectangles) displayed on a screen, and demonstrated that these shrimp respond using the same behaviors to both real clients in nature and synthetic client stimuli that are purely visual. Lastly, we determined which aspects of a visual stimulus elicit cleaning behavior from shrimp by manipulating our visual stimuli to have different shapes (rectangles, circles, triangles), colors (black or white), orientations (horizontal or vertical), and motions (constant motion, or entering the screen and then stopping). In nature, the decision of a shrimp to provide cleaning services is likely based on a combination of tactile, chemical, and visual cues. Here, however, we show that, despite having vision that is both color blind and coarse, cleaner shrimp do use their visual system to discriminate between different stimuli and to facilitate the decision to engage in cleaning behavior.
