‘Underwater dentist’: Find out why this fish is cleaning mouth of a diver

Cleaner fishes often pick up parasites, bacteria, and dead skin from the mouth and other body parts of aquatic animals in an attempt to get nutrition.

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A fascinating video of a ‘cleaner fish’ swimming inside a diver’s mouth is raking in likes on social media.

The fish in the video appears to be a bluestreak cleaner wrasse, known to clean (aka eat) dead skin, parasites, and bacteria from the mouth and other body parts of aquatic animals like sea turtles, shrimps, eels, and whales, among others.

This symbiotic relationship of cleaning and getting cleaned allows the cleaner fishes to get nutrition, while the animal getting cleaned gets rid of dead cells and parasites. In the now-viral video, it appears that the bluestreak cleaner wrasse confused the diver with an aquatic animal.

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On Monday, the popular account @Rainmaker1973 posted this clip on X. Commenting on it, an X user wrote, “Even after factoring in the plane ticket, hotel, scuba license, and boat gas, I’m willing to bet it’s still cheaper than a visit to the dentist.”

Underwater dental cleaning completed.

Cleaner fish show a specialist feeding strategy by providing a service to other species by removing dead skin, ectoparasites, and infected tissue from the skin or gill chambers. Or a human mouth.

[📹 noa_7269]pic.twitter.com/8KS6yeuzjC

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 11, 2023

Another user wrote, “The crazy thing is how other fish automatically know what this Wrasse does. I put one in my aquarium and all my other fish immediately lined up like they was at the car wash or something…”.

This video was originally posted on Instagram by user @noa_7269 on July 7.

In 2020, a picture documenting ‘cleaner fishes’ in action went viral. The photo showed a group of remora fishes residing inside a shark’s mouth. The remora fishes often feed off parasites on the shark’s skin and mouth and get protection from predators in exchange. These fishes sometimes attach themselves to the bodies of friendly sharks while moving long distances.