Pairs of cleaner fish prolong interaction duration with client reef fish by increasing service quality

Simon Gingins and Redouan Bshary

Behavioral Ecology, 2015, vol. 26, issue 2, 350-358

Abstract: Few biological examples of cooperation seem to precisely fit the assumptions of an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. In an attempt to increase biological validity, one model altered the assumption that cooperating is an all-or-nothing decision to a situation where benefits are a function of interaction duration, which in turn is a function of the levels of cooperation. A potential application involves pairs of cleaner fish coinspecting a client fish. In this mutualism, clients visit cleaners to have ectoparasites removed but a conflict of interest exists, as cleaners prefer to eat client mucus, which constitutes cheating. As large clients often flee in response to a cleaner cheating, pair inspections lead to a dilemma: the cheater obtains the benefit while both cleaners share the cost of the client leaving. The model predicts that pairs of cleaners behave more cooperatively toward reef fish clients than when inspecting alone, to entice clients to profit from the increased parasite removal rate and keep interaction duration almost constant. Here, we present field experiments that first replicate results that pairs behave indeed more cooperatively than when inspecting alone and second show that levels of cooperation quantitatively predict the duration of cleaning interactions. We also found that several additional variables may affect the duration of cleaning interactions, such as a client’s willingness to interact with a cleaner, identity of interaction terminator, and the presence of bystanders. In conclusion, introducing benefits as a function of interaction duration into the prisoner’s dilemma framework provides a biologically relevant framework to study cooperation.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/aru194 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:26:y:2015:i:2:p:350-358.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().