[leebca]

Life is hard enough for a little fish in the Red Sea. If swimming in the open water a grouper is likely to eat it; if swimming in the crevices, an eel is likely to eat it. It's a tough life. But if this weren't enough, it now seems that eels and groupers have united in their hunting efforts.

Reported in the March, 2007 edition of Natural History magazine is research work done by Redouan Bshary, a behavioral ecologist at the Univ of Neuchatel in Switzerland. They discovered that a grouper in open Red Sea water wanting to hunt, wags its head to signal a nearby eel. The eel joins the grouper in a hunt. The eel lays in near or in the crevices hunting and the grouper combs the open water. If a prey fish darts out from the crevices because it saw the eel, the grouper makes a meal out of it. If a fish sees the grouper and dashes into the crevices, it finds itself a meal of the eel.

They also found that when a grouper hunts alone and chases the fish into the crevices, it will wag its head in a different way to signal to a nearby eel that some prey is in the crevices.

It's very unusual that different species hunt together. Cooperative hunting between species is considered to be only a human trait, like using dogs to hunt. Cooperative hunting is found within a species (e.g., canines and felines) in nature, but not between different species -- until now.

The prey is not shared. The eel eats what it catches and the grouper eats what it catches. As it turns out, this cooperative hunting improves the grouper's chances of success by 5 (five) fold!

If things weren't bad enough for reef fishes -- they are now hunted in cooperative groups of different species!

[zhenya]

Originally Posted by leebca

If things weren't bad enough for reef fishes -- they are now hunted in cooperative groups of different species!

Indeed!
I saw series of shows on HDTV at the end of last year and saw this for the first time, the groupers and eels cooperating in their hunting efforts. What will they learn next?

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by zhenya

Indeed!
I saw series of shows on HDTV at the end of last year and saw this for the first time, the groupers and eels cooperating in their hunting efforts. What will they learn next?

I saw that same program! It was really fascinating to see it in action.



P.S. -- There are many examples of interspecific cooperative hunting in the ocean realm but that's the first verified example (that I know of) of communication between the species.

I saw a different program just a couple of days ago that focused on the communication between reef squid. It also included cuttlefish and octopuses but the main thrust of the program was on the research that has been done to identify the two dozen or so distinct patterns that reef squid use to communicate. There are thousands of variations but there are certain distinct patterns that mean different things. It's sort of like the audible differences in communications between marine mammals except that here we are talking about various color patterns that these very intelligent molluscs use to communicate with each other.