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They are commonly found attached to sharks, manta rays, whales, turtles, and dugongs, hence the common names "sharksucker" and "whalesucker". Smaller remoras also fasten onto fish such as tuna and swordfish, and some of the smallest remoras travel in the mouths or gills of large manta rays, ocean sunfish, swordfish and sailfish.
The common remora (Remora remora) is a pelagic marine fish [3] belonging to the family Echeneidae.The dorsal fin, which has 22 to 26 soft rays, acts as a suction cup, creating a vacuum [4] to allow the fish to attach to larger marine animals, such as whales, dolphins, sharks, and sea turtles.
As a juvenile, it sometimes acts as a cleaner fish on a reef station; its diet consists of small parasitic crustaceans such as copepods, isopods, and ostracods. [ 10 ] When attached to a host, the remora eats parasitic crustaceans, food scraps from its host's feeding activity, and even some small food captured by filtering water through its ...
One of the whalesucker's most outstanding traits, shared among the Echeinedae family, is an adhesive disk. The adhesive disk is a round, oval, sucking disk located on the top of a remora's head, with two layers of lamellae that allow for the remora to stick and unstick to the epidermal surfaces of larger fish, mainly cetaceans.
Common names of fish can refer to a single species; to an entire group of species, such as a genus or family; or to multiple unrelated species or groups. Ambiguous common names are accompanied by their possible meanings. Scientific names for individual species and higher taxa are included in parentheses.
The name "cookiecutter shark" refers to its feeding method of gouging round plugs, as if cut out with a cookie cutter, out of larger animals. Marks made by cookiecutter sharks have been found on a wide variety of marine mammals and fishes, and on submarines , undersea cables , and human bodies.
All sharks and rays are cartilaginous fish, contrasting with bony fishes. Many rays are adapted for feeding on the bottom. Many rays are adapted for feeding on the bottom. Guitarfishes are somewhat between sharks and rays, displaying characteristics of both (though they are classified as rays).
Guitarfish have a body form intermediate between those of sharks and rays. The tail has a typical shark-like form, but in many species, the head has a triangular, or guitar-like shape, rather than the disc-shape formed by fusion with the pectoral fins found in other rays.