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Cleaning Behaviors
Cleaning Behaviors
Cleaning behaviors are critical in reducing disease, maintaining body coverings, and social bonding.
Learning Objective: Analyze data on cleaning behaviors, determining the impact on animal survival.
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If you have spent time watching animals, whether they are wild or domesticated, you see the same basic activities throughout the day: sleeping, thermoregulating, foraging or hunting for food, and cleaning.
Often cleaning is overlooked despite critical impact on survival.
Some animals get a significant portion of their nutrients by cleaning other species Oxpeckers are African songbirds that eat ticks, blowfly larvae and other parasites off the skin of large mammmals
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