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A white man in a blue shirt stands in front of an illustrated blue background with fish and the text "animal car wash?" across his chest, referencing animal mutualism.

How Different Animal Species Work Together

What do you call this type of animal friendship? Mutualism, of course.
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Media Editor: Lauren Sims
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    Various fish species in South Pacific coral reefs
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Related Articles: commensalism , community ecology , mutualism , Animal social behavior , wrasse

Transcript

These fishes in tropical reefs called wrasses, they pick off parasites from larger fishes who happen to stop by, as one might do in a car wash. So the wrasses benefit by getting a free meal, and the larger fishes benefit by getting cleaned. It’s an example of a mutualism, and that’s an interaction between two species where both of them get something. A recent paper came out showing the same kind of mutualistic behavior between two types of ants in Arizona. These red harvester ants are walking around the desert. There are these other ants from the genus Dorymyrmex, and what they do is they start to clean the bacterial film and the parasites off of these red harvester ants. What makes this all crazy is you don’t normally see one ant species teaming up with another ant species. This is almost unheard of. Ants are notoriously competitive with one another. This 2026 paper mentions one of the first instances that this kind of behavior is actually taking place.