Shrimp doctor teeth hygiene for divers

Doctor shrimp clean up food scraps and plaque on the diver's teeth similar to how it cleans fish skin.

Doctor shrimp is a diligent invertebrate that specializes in eating parasites and dead skin on fish, helping them to be healthy and also getting a full meal. But when the divers approached, shrimp doctors also happily flossed their teeth. On a vacation on Hideaway Island in Vanuatu, Victoria Kronsell from Melbourne, Australia, recording a diver for a shrimp doctor flossing his teeth in the wreck of the wrecked eastern clownfish, National Geographic reported.

Shrimp doctor dental floss.

Divers also often try this type of dental hygiene, according to Benjamin Titus at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who studied the effects of interacting with divers on doctor shrimp. Shrimp have very poor eyesight, which may explain why they are not afraid of human customers. Shrimp can see divers swim slowly and "just see them as a big fish , " said Eleanor Caves, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, North Carolina.

In a recent study, Caves pointed out that the shrimp even tried to clean up the dark shapes on the iPad screen placed against the pool wall. Fish often turn darker to signal that they want to clean the shrimp. The appearance of divers can also affect hygiene behavior. In the 2015 study, Titus and his colleagues observed hygiene activities in two diving areas, one where there was no one while the other was very popular.

The hygiene behavior between shrimp and fish did not change when viewed through the camera, but halved at the popular diving area when there were humans. When the diver visits the empty area, the activity stops. The finding indicates that fish can adapt to the presence of divers but are not fully adapted.

Staying in place and exposing yourself to the water column during cleaning can make the fish more susceptible to predators than usual and the appearance of divers who easily removes fish from hygienic intent may harm them ."By taking up space at a clean-up place, divers can scare or block customers who need cleaning , " Caves said.

Titus noted that this interactive activity was quite cheerful, but did not encourage the use of crustaceans. According to him, the first dive rule is "not holding the breath" to avoid an increased risk of emphysema. "That's exactly what you do when a shrimp crawls through your mouth," Titus said.