ARTICLE
Examples of symbiosis in tropical marine
fishes
John E. Randall & Arik
Diamant
Introduction
The word symbiosis is from
the Greek meaning living together, but
present usage means two dissimilar organisms living
together for mutual benefit. Ecologists prefer to
use the term mutualism for this. The significance
of symbiosis and its crucial role in coral reef function
is becoming increasingly obvious in the worlds
warming oceans. A coral colony consists of numerous
coral polyps, each like a tiny sea anemone that secretes
calcium carbonate to form the hard skeletal part of
coral. The polyps succeed in developing into a coral
colony only by forming a symbiotic relationship with
a free-living yellowish brown algal cell that has
two flagella for locomotion. These cells penetrate
the coral tissue (the flagella drop off) to live in
the inner layer of the coral polyps collectively as
zooxanthellae and give the yellowish brown color to
the coral colony. As plants, they use the carbon dioxide
and water from the respiration of the polyps to carry
out photosynthesis that provides oxygen, sugars, and
lipids for the growth of the coral. All this takes
place within a critical range of sea temperature.
If too warm or too cold, the coral polyps extrude
their zooxanthellae and become white (a phenomenon
also termed bleaching). If the sea temperature
soon returns to normal, the corals can be reinvaded
by the zooxanthellae and survive.
The current scientific community generally agrees
that if the warming of our planet from the burning
of fossil fuels continues, along with deforestation,
our coral reefs are doomed. The corals of the magnificent
Great Barrier Reef of Australia are beginning to die,
and with them all the dependent marine life will likely
perish. We should learn all we are able about the
biology of coral reefs. A long list of relevant publications
on the ecology of coral reefs, especially with respect
to fishes, is given below in References. The following
are among the more important papers that report on
symbiosis on coral reefs, especially in relation to
fishes: Ormond (1980a, 1980b), Diamant & Shpigel
(1985), and Bshary et al. (2006).
Knowing that my colleague Arik Diamant in Israel has
photographs of different species of fishes that forage
together, as well as fishes with octopus, I suggested
that we join forces and present the best photos we
can find to illustrate symbiosis in fishes. We have
assembled 27 photographs for this article.
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CITATION:
Randall, J.E. & Diamant,
A. (2017) Examples of symbiosis in tropical marine
fishes. Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation,
26, 9-115.
.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.579544
publication date: 11 June
2017
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