Before deciding whether or not to fight another fish, cleaner wrasse check their own reflection in a mirror and size themselves up. First, Taiga Kobayashi at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan and ...

It’s almost automatic—if you notice a smudge when you look in the mirror, you wipe it off. Seems simple, but only a few particularly clever species such as orangutans and dolphins share this ability ...

It’s not easy for fish to clean themselves, without limbs or digits to scrub those hard-to-reach places. Fortunately for them, coral reefs come with cleaning stations. At particular sites, an itchy ...

Hailing from the warm, coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, including around Australia, Indonesia, and New Caledonia, the fairy wrasses are known for their intensely beautiful (some say ...

In the fascinating underwater world, gender is far from fixed. Many aquatic animals can change their sex, a unique biological process known as sequential hermaphroditism. This natural adaptation ...

It’s the king of the coral reefs. The humphead wrasse, fittingly named for the bump on its head, can grow to six feet long, weigh up to 400 pounds, and live for 30 years. Also known as Napoleon ...

Three fish species that live in the Laccadive Sea, off the southwest corner of the Indian coast, are capable of using tools, we recently found. Our study was published in the journal Coral Reefs in ...

The endangered humphead wrasse, a reef fish that swims the seas from Africa to the South Pacific, is in high demand in mainland China and Hong Kong as a luxury culinary delicacy. Despite harvest ...