Abstract
Suckerfish attached to dolphin species have been extensively reported worldwide, yet such association has been rarely seen in the tropical and shallow waters of South America. In Brazil, the Guiana dolphin Sotalia guianensis is distributed along almost the entire coastal extension and only one case of association with suckerfish has been published. Here we report on a sharksucker Echeneis naucrates associated with a young Guiana dolphin for north-eastern coast of Brazil. The juvenile dolphin with an attached sharksucker was observed in two occasions separated by a 47-day period; we hypothesize the occurrence of host attachment fidelity. The present report adds information to better discuss the ecological interactions between echeneids and dolphins, and expands the baseline information on cetacean species serving as host to suckerfish.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom |
| Volume | 102 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Early online date | 25 Aug 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 25 Aug 2022 |
Keywords
- Cetaceans
- Commensalism
- Ecology
- Fish
- Host-fidelity
- Interaction
- Marine mammal
Access to Document
- Souto_2022_JMBAUK_First-Record-Sharksucker_CC
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.