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#fish#cleaner#https#more#cooperation#intelligence#theory#highly#com#try

Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

marojejian•17 minutes ago
NYT story earlier on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754440
awinter-py•about 2 hours ago
this is no surprise to anyone who has read dougal dixon's 'man after man'
awakeasleep•about 1 hour ago
why haven't any animals adapted to this role for humans!
victorbjorklund•9 minutes ago
Plenty of bacteria lives in your guts feeding on your food and generating useful by-products.
TeMPOraL•32 minutes ago
How do you know they didn't? When was the last time you just let bugs spend time on you?
Joel_Mckay•30 minutes ago
There are more mites specialized to live on your eyebrows skin than many like to think about. =3
encrux•about 1 hour ago
In a Sense, cats did actually. Not through direct contact, but by getting rid of mice and rats that infiltrate food storage.
buildbot•about 1 hour ago
Cat’s will also literally try to clean you as well!
laidoffamazon•28 minutes ago
Can we squint and say the gut microbiome is kind of like this?
Joel_Mckay•31 minutes ago
There are many Garra rufa subspecies that were the source of compounds used in treating modern autoimmune and skin disorders.

The fishes histories go back thousands of years. As a species it is super interesting... some evolved in hot-spring conditions that would simply cook most other animals. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_garra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLWkojAnyH0

LeCompteSftware•about 3 hours ago
This is very cool, and quite surprising. Cleaner fish are thought to be among the most intelligent fish because of the complexity and danger of their feeding strategy: it takes careful planning and quick thinking. But they aren't tied to any particular species of host or general tactic; naively I imagine cleaner fish are more versatile and adaptable than cone ants.

It would be interesting to learn if this occurs with other species of ants. I suppose until now nobody thought to look.

lisper•about 2 hours ago
Cooperation and symbiosis are very general survival strategies. They apear at all levels of the biological abstraction hierarchy, all the way down to mitochondria, which are almost certainly descended from what was once an independent organism. In fact, even a genome itself can be seen as a collection of mutually cooperating replicators. No intelligence is required for cooperation to evolve. It's a straightforward consequence of game theory.
culi•about 1 hour ago
Yes! Cooperation seems to be just as fundamental, if not more, than competition. We wouldn't have gotten volcanic islands to break down into soil if it weren't for the partnership that is lichen. We wouldn't be able to digest a tenth of what we're able to eat if it weren't for our gut bacteria. We wouldn't have trees if it weren't for mycorrhizal fungi which over 90% of plants depend on.

There's a famous paper/framework called "Major evolutionary transitions in individuality" that sketches out a big picture pattern of major evolutionary advances in complexity following a surprisingly consistent pattern: As cooperation and division of labor strongly increase, selection starts working on larger entities. This pattern holds all the way back to the origin of life itself as things moved from self-assembling molecules to compartmentalized populations of molecules, from replicators to chromosomes, from RNA+enzymes to DNA+proteins, from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells, from unicellular to multicellular, from individuals to colonies/superorganisms, and (possibly) onwards to more complex societies

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421402112

lisper•about 1 hour ago
> Cooperation seems to be just as fundamental, if not more, than competition

Both are fundamental. You can't survive without cooperating, but you also can't survive if you try to cooperate with the entire biosphere because ultimately there is competition for scarce resources. If you don't assert yourself to claim your share of those, something else will.

fsckboy•about 1 hour ago
mmmm it's equally likely that mitochondria's precursors were self interested parasites or predators, whose negative effects were competitively neutralized by defensive host adaptations that exploititively colonialized them. No intelligence or cooperation is required for co-opt-ation to evolve. It's a straightforward consequence of game theory.
lisper•about 1 hour ago
> it's equally likely that mitochondria's precursors were self interested parasites or predators

That is in no way at odds with what I said.

LeCompteSftware•about 1 hour ago
This is a frustrating response to my comment. I am aware that symbiosis is universal. That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about the specific and highly unusual behavior of crawling inside of a much larger animal's mouth and trusting it not to eat you. Cleaner fish are highly intelligent[1] and it appears that this intelligence is necessary for their niche:

- picking a good location for a cleaning station requires long-term planning and real strategic judgment;

- deciding which hosts to accept is a complex skill requiring some sort of rudimentary theory of mind + long-term development of social ties;

- like crows, cleaner fish are jerks who constantly try to screw each other over, so there is something of a cognition arms race.

I will add that the wrasse family of cleaner fish use rocks to smash open shellfish (i.e. they are tool-users), and they have very complex group strategies for raising their young. In fact I'm not convinced that wrasse evolved to be cleaner fish at all: they are natural scavengers and scum-suckers, perhaps cleaning stations are a form of cultural technology.

I would be extremely surprised if any of this was true for cone ants. I suspect that is more hard-wired, perhaps a local subspecies stumbled into a genetic fluke, and as you say due to game theory it is a local optimum this population has settled on. If this behavior were common like it is in vertebrates, we probably would have seen it earlier. But who knows? 20 years ago I would have thought "fish have a form of culture" is too ridiculous an idea to consider.

[1] Seriously: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cusj/blog/vi... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-25837-0

lisper•about 1 hour ago
> I am talking about the specific and highly unusual behavior of crawling inside of a much larger animal's mouth and trusting it not to eat you.

OK.

> Cleaner fish are highly intelligent[1]

Yes.

> and it appears that this intelligence is necessary

Manifestly not, at least not in general.

> for their niche:

That is an open question. Just because an unintelligent cleaner fish hasn't evolved doesn't mean it couldn't.