ABSTRACT
In 1928, the renowned American ocean explorer and naturalist Charles William Beebe published his 12th book, Beneath Tropic Seas: A Record of Diving among the Coral Reefs of Haiti. Th e best-selling book relates in eclectic detail the first American expedition to explore the underwater world of the Caribbean Sea. Equipped with helmet, hose and pump, Beebe observed a wide variety of brilliantly coloured fi sh, corals and sponges. His observations, made in passing, of small fi sh picking at the mouth of parrotfi sh provide the earliest written record of cleaning behaviour. Cleaning interactions, in which a small fi sh or shrimp removes ectoparasites and other materials from the body surface of larger-bodied clients, have since proven to be widespread in the marine realm and have been the focus of intense study by behavioural and evolutionary ecologists over the past two decades (Côté, 2000). A number of cleanerfi sh species are found in the
Caribbean, but the object of William Beebe’s attention were young wrasses. Th is is surprising because gobies, and not wrasses, are the most ubiquitous and only group of obligate cleanerfi sh in the region. In this chapter, we focus on gobies as cleanerfi sh. Th e chapter is divided into three parts. First, we begin by examining the distribution of cleaning behaviour in the family Gobiidae, make inferences about the number of independent evolutionary occurrences of this behaviour, and describe the evolutionary correlates of cleaning in gobies. Second, we review current knowledge of the costs and benefi ts of cleaning by gobies and how the use of market and game theory has increased our understanding of how cleaning gobies interact with their fish clients. Finally, we examine the role cleaning gobies play in the fish communities in which they exist. Th roughout, we draw parallels with cleaner wrasses-especially Labroides dimidiatus, the most ubiquitous cleaners in the Indo-Pacifi c and a model for the development of many ideas about the evolution of cleaning behaviour.
