Diurnal gnathiid consumption in fish sampled from shallow reef sites in Caribbean waters from May 2017 to Sep 2021

With sufficient functional redundancy, ecosystem services can persist without specialists. Grooming behaviors are common in both terrestrial and aquatic organisms.

However, in aquatic systems there is a heavy reliance on intraspecific mutualisms where specialist species groom or "clean" parasites off of host fishes. Here, we sampled the gut contents of 709 fishes, representing 61 species and including both cleaner and non-cleaner fishes, to compare their consumption of gnathiid isopods, the most common fish ectoparasites. This dataset contains sample and collection metadata, including date, location, and method of sampling, as well as species, stage, length, and Gnathiid count for samples collected.