![]() Many cleaner species often wait at fixed territories, or cleaning stations, for clients to visit them. ![]() Cleaners gain a source of food from the cleaning service they provide to clients, while clients benefit from parasite removal ( Clague et al. Cleaning involves a cleaner species, such as a fish or shrimp, removing ectoparasites, and debris from the body of another species termed a “client” ( Feder 1966). The interactions between cleaner fish and their clients provide an ideal system for testing how direct and indirect factors affect the distribution of mutualistic partners across an environment. Understanding how partners are distributed across an environment and assessing the contribution of the direct (goods or services) and indirect (e.g., third-party presence and interactions) factors that may promote this differential distribution, therefore, is an important and largely unexplored extension of biological market theory. In turn, this can alter an individual’s choice to engage with one partner over another, indirectly affecting the distribution of mutualistic partners in the environment ( Bronstein and Barbosa 2002). For example, the local presence of a predator or competitor near a mutualistic partner may deter or prevent an individual entering the area and interacting with that partner ( Werner and Peacor 2003). An individual’s choice to visit one partner over another, however, could also be affected by the presence and or behaviors of other third-party species, indirectly altering partner choice. This partner choice therefore, is thought to play an important role in promoting the occurrence and maintenance of mutualisms ( Foster and Wenseleers 2006). Such choices promote competition for the best partners: competitors should outbid others given the costs and constraints of doing so ( Bshary and Noë 2003 Noe and Voelkl 2013). Indeed, these choices could be based on the likelihood, quality, or amount of goods or services received, otherwise known as biological market theory ( Noë 2001 Bshary and Noë 2003). Because individual partners differ in their likelihood or abilities to provide goods or services ( Hammerstein and Noë 2016), individuals can maximize the benefits they receive by interacting with partners who provide more or higher quality services or rewards ( Noë 2001). Such interactions are often characterized by a high number of different partners interacting with one another ( Stanton 2003), many of which can actively choose whom to interact with ( Enquist and Leimar 1993 Bshary 2001). Food resources, for example, can be traded for pollination, cleaning, or protection services ( Hammerstein and Noë 2016). Mutualistic interactions often involve the beneficial exchange of goods and services between partners. Moreover, we highlight how cooperative interactions may be indirectly governed by external partners. Our study highlights, therefore, the need to consider the indirect effects of third-party species and their interactions (e.g., agonistic interactions) when attempting to understand mutualistic interactions between species. Through quantifying the visitation and cleaning patterns of client fish that can choose which cleaning station(s) to visit, we found that the relative species richness of visiting clients at stations was negatively associated with the presence of disruptive territorial damselfish at the station. We investigated how different clients of the sharknose goby ( Elacatinus evelynae) cleaner fish were distributed across cleaning stations, and asked what characteristics, relating to biological market theory, affected this distribution. Third-party species that are not directly involved in the interaction, however, may indirectly affect the occurrence and or quality of the services provided, thereby affecting which partners are selected or avoided. As predicted by biological market theory, partners should be selected based on the likelihood, quality, reward level, and or services each partner can offer. sidebar Created with Sketch.Mutualisms are driven by partners deciding to interact with one another to gain specific services or rewards. ![]()
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