Jade Sourisse1, Jose Ricardo Paula2,1
1MARE – Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre & ARNET – Aquatic Research Network, Portugal - 2Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Cleaner fish contribute to the stability and health of their marine ecosystems by removing parasites and dead tissue from other fish. While the role of cleaning in structuring community dynamics has been primarily studied on coral reefs, temperate reefs also harbour a variety of cleaner fish. However, in both cases, the relative importance of these interactions has predominantly been explored at local geographical scales, leaving its biogeographic variation largely unexplored. Here, we investigated how cleaning mutualisms vary across marine biogeographical regions. Namely, we integrated fish distribution and abundance data from survey databases with metrics derived from reported cleaning interactions and ectoparasite distribution and abundance data from the literature. We described cleaner fish diversity, the intensity of cleaning interactions, and the extent of ectoparasite removal at the ecoregion scale, evaluating how these factors vary across biogeographical provinces. Our study compares the relative importance of fish cleaning interactions across marine ecoregions globally, with a particular emphasis on differences between tropical and temperate reefs. This comparative approach aims to clarify the role of cleaning mutualisms in shaping marine ecosystems at larger spatial scales.
Biography
Jade is a post-doc working in at University of Lisbon, currently focusing on the importance of cleaning mutualisms for coral reef ecosystems. Jade did her MSc at Sorbonne Universite and the Smithsonian Tropical Institute with a research project on habitat destruction effects on fish microbiome, and completed her PhD at the University of Hong Kong where she focused on the behavioural and neuromolecular responses of aquatic organisms to environmental changes (warming and acidification).