Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chazinski,
and once again we have gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
and in a particular order, here we go, starting with Andy.
My fact is that fish who work as cleaners can cheat their bosses, and their bosses can punish them.
So this is incredible, there are fish, as I'm sure you know,
who clean other fish, as in they eat parasites from the skin.
So you get cleaner fish and client fish, is what they're technically known as.
And there have been lots of studies of this, especially by this amazing sounding ecologist called Redouin Bicheri,
I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, who has studied these guys so much,
and basically the trade is for food versus clean skin.
But the cleaner fish, they sometimes cheat,
because they actually like eating the thick mucous that covers the client fish as a protective layer,
and they often have a cheeky bite of it instead of eating a parasite,
and that makes the client fish jump, I guess, in pain.
So that's them treating it, and then their bosses, the client fish, punish them by chasing them around.
And the cleaner fish, which have been chased around, then behave better in future.
They stop misbehaving as much when they've been chased about.
What are they threatening to do when they chase them around?