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Symbiotic shrimp gobies


wasp

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These are really cool little gobies that share a burrow with a shrimp. The shrimp digs the burrow and maintains it, and the goby sits outside during the day keeping an eye out for food, and danger. The shrimp keeps one antennae on the gobies tail, and if anything threatening happens, the shrimp can tell by the gobies body language through it's tail, and dashes into the burrow, followed by the goby. They keep a small rock by the entrance of the burrow, and each night when they go in, the goby places the rock over the entrance.

Here is a vidoe of them in action. This video also shows a much larger wormfish, which sometimes shares the burrow also, but contributes nothing.

http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/movie ... s_high.wmv

If you are lucky enough to get one of these shrimp / goby pairs, it is the next most sought after symbiotic type relationship we can have in our tanks, after the clown / anemone one.

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For some reason went spent ages learning about this type of interaction in my marine bio class, sometimes there is a small "group" that all interact within the same peice of coral, consisting of a crab, fish and shrimp. They all cooperate, and remember each other if ones goes missing, fighting off "replacements" for a few days, which is pretty amazing, they can all tell specific individuals from a species other than theirs.

You could try and set the whole system up, it would be cool to see. I could have a look through my notes and see what species form these "communities".

Another weird thing is lots of the shrimp who live with gobys have lost their ability to see.

Also in reefs there are sometimes "cleaning stations", where cleaning shrimp line up along a crevice, and fish come in, in turns after waiting, just like a pit crew. Looks real weird.

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