By: Sophia Byl
Say you pull up to a car wash one afternoon just for a short clean. It’s something you’ve been putting off for a while, and you’ve got a bit of free time, so why not do it now? But as you follow the car wash employee’s directions to pull forward onto the conveyor belt, you sense something isn’t right. Your hunch is confirmed as more workers swarm around your car, laughing maniacally as they rub sandpaper all over the beautiful blue paint, drag keys along the doors, and dent the metal with punches and blows from various tools. Stunned, you manage to drive forward and escape, but the damage has been done. Your car is ruined, your mood is crushed, and due to the abundance of witnesses, the car wash’s reputation is smashed.
Thankfully, occurrences like this in human society are uncommon. There’s nothing the perpetrator really gains from the situation besides some emotional satisfaction at having ruined someone’s day and their car. In the brutal world of nature, however, nothing exists without reason, and every action has a motive.
Lying and deception, therefore, run rampant in the wild, taking form as mimicry. Harmless species will don the bright warning colors of poisonous animals in order to avoid predation, certain animals may camouflage as inanimate objects, and–perhaps the most dastardly form of mimicry–symbiotic relationships may turn sour when a parasite masquerades as a friendly species.
Going back to the car wash metaphor: the natural world’s counterpart is the existence of so-called “cleaning stations” in coral reefs. A little fish known as a cleaner wrasse sets up shop here, beckoning larger fish over with a special dance. Conveniently, the cleaner’s favorite food is the dead skin cells and parasites that reside on the scales of these larger fish. Once the client pulls up to the cleaning station, the cleaner wrasse gets to work removing all this unwanted debris. The larger fish is left with a shiny, healthier coat of scales, and the cleaner wrasse gets a good meal out of its service.
The mischievous parasite that has learned to exploit the relationship between the cleaner and its clients is known as the sabretooth blenny. Utilizing the evolutionary tactic known as aggressive mimicry, the blenny copies the cleaner fish’s pattern and its unique dance to lure unsuspecting fish to what they think is a cleaning station. But once the mimic has their trust, it will attack the larger fish, biting off chunks of scales and skin with razor-sharp teeth.
Of course, if you went to such a car wash as described in the opening paragraph, you would likely not be a returning customer. The case is the same for the cleaner fish’s clients: once they are tricked by a sabretooth blenny, they lose trust in the cleaning station where the attack happened and do not return. This is detrimental for both the cleaner and the blenny, who both lose access to their respective food sources. As a result, both species must seek out new clients/victims, ones that can not yet tell the difference between friend and foe.
Curiously, food is not the only reason that the sabretooth blenny disguises itself as the helpful cleaner fish. The majority of the cleaner’s clients are also predatory fish that wouldn’t think twice before eating a smaller fish–however, the service the cleaner fish provides to its would-be predators renders it immune to being eaten by them. Biologists have posed the theory that blennies simply mimic the cleaner fish’s colors in order to stay safe from possible predators. Scientists at the University of Chicago have investigated the cleaner’s and blenny’s possible relationship of “reciprocal altruism”. This essentially means that the two fish species are doing each other a favor: if the blenny is not aggressive towards the cleaner’s clients and only copies its colors, the cleaner can still continue its services, and the mimicking blenny remains safe from any predators.
Mimicry in nature allows species to both help each other out and backstab each other, and new methods and adaptations constantly pop up as the evolutionary race continues (thanks to the Red Queen Hypothesis of how organisms must constantly compete evolutionarily to win the battle of natural selection). Imagine if, in society today, we had this sort of evolutionary competition similar to what’s happening in nature. Would it result in more chain restaurants, or more independent businesses as everyone races to be unique? How would stores compete with each other in terms of opening hours, or advertising tactics? One thing is for sure, though–if car washes operated in the same way as the cleaner fish and blenny’s stations, most people would likely wash their vehicles at home, for fear of someone biting a chunk out of their car door.
