SCIENCE LAB SCENICS : ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION

WHEN danger calls - some animals bare their teeth. Others take to the sky, or curl into protective balls.

But the remora - a fish that often hitches a ride on larger marine animals like sea turtles, whales and sharks - sometimes follows a less dignified strategy : It disappears inside a manta ray's rear end.

In a study published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, a team of researchers referred to this newly observed behaviour as '' cloacal diving. '' While many questions about this fishy practice remain, there is one thing the team feel sure about.

'' It does not look like the manta ray likes it, said Catherine Macdonald, director of the shark research and conservation program at the University of Miami and senior author of the new study.

While remoras also known as suckerfish have been observed diving into the safety of whale shark cloacae in the past, this is the first time anyone had documented the behaviour with manta rays.

The paper uses seven instances of cloacal diving that took place between 2010 and 2025 across all three known species of manta ray.

What's more, the observations which were gathered by the Marine Megafauna Foundation, occurred in three separate ocean basins, suggesting that this previously unobserved behaviour could be common among rays and the remora species that associate with them.

In some cases, the remora forces itself so far inside the ray's cloaca that only the very tip of its tail can be seen protruding from the exterior.

In others, the ray is not large enough to accommodate the remoras entire body, and half of the  suckerfish hangs out of the ray like a toddler playing a peekaboo beneath a blanket.

While all of this may seem as if it's a lark - NEWS FLASH : Fish hides inside another fish's backside -the findings contribute new information to a topic already hotly debated by scientists : the type of impact remoras have on their hosts.

!WOW! thanks Jason Bittel.