The Author, the Sweetlips, and the Puffer Fish,end bold,
paragraph 1,On Australia's Great Barrier Reef, if you dive down with the sun's rays as they slice into the sea, a festival of life explodes into view.
paragraph 2,At least 2,000 species of fish, plus invertebrates and other critters, wriggle and flit along the walls of the reef, which is a series of coral mountains that rise and fall for some 1,400 miles—the largest living natural structure on Earth. There, on one particularly lively stretch of rock, I witnessed a marine partnership unlike anything I'd seen before.
paragraph 3,The ocean is a good place to find "symbiotic" relationships—associations of different species that may offer benefits like access to food, protection, or just a ride from here to there. Think of clownfish that gain security from predators by living within toxic anemones, or the remora fish that clings to a shark's belly to feed on the parasites living there.
paragraph 4,But this was not a case of symbiosis I'd heard about before, nor one that had an obvious explanation. It was truly a bizarre assemblage of "friends." Our dive group—on assignment for ,begin italics,National Geographic,end italics, magazine, and including photographers David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes—had been exploring this site for days, and we'd all seen the puffer fish before. He . . . was an old specimen, a tattered softball of a fish. He was always alone, lolling about on the sea floor or moving slowly through the shallows. Oddly tame, he let me approach to within inches and swim alongside him. The manic vibrations of his tiny fins propelled the bulbous fish forward, one eye twitching quick looks my way.
paragraph 5,One afternoon as I came off the edge of the reef, I saw my friend the puffer—but this time he wasn't alone. He had found his way to the very middle of a shoal of fish utterly unlike himself. They were sweetlips, a colorful, wide-mouthed type of grunt that schools in large numbers in sunny, shallow waters. The aged puffer, a scruffy blight on their collective loveliness, was hanging out among them as if he belonged, and the sweetlips seemed oblivious to the invader. The fish hung in the water as if attached to the strings of a mobile, rising and falling in sync at the whim of the currents. The puffer looked absurd yet strangely regal in his place at center, a halo of yellow beauties surrounding his bloated, kingly form.
A chart for Starry Puffer Fish.
Short description, A chart for Starry Puffer Fish., Long description,
A chart showing a large, round starry puffer fish. It shows the scientific classification of the starry puffer fish.
Kingdom: Animalia.
Phylum: Chordata.
Class: Actinopterygii.
Order: Tetraodontiformes.
Family: Tetraodontidae.
Genus: Arothron.
Species: Arothron stellatus.
A chart for Oriental Sweetlips.
Short description, A chart for Oriental Sweetlips., Long description,
A chart showing a thin, long oriental sweetlips fish. It shows the scientific classification of the oriental sweetlips.
Kingdom: Animalia.
Phylum: Chordata.
Class: Actinopterygii.
Order: Perciformes.
Family: Haemulidae.
Genus: Plectorhinchus.
Species: Plectorhinchus vittatus.
paragraph 6,It wasn't a fluke. The odd cluster was there again later, and the next day as well. The interspecies group was the welcoming party as we arrived on the reef and the well-wishers as we departed. It was a delightful scene.
paragraph 7,What interest this giant puffer fish had in the sweetlips, I can only guess. My best "biologically correct" explanation: Both species love a good cleaning, and cleaner wrasses—small fish that pick old skin and parasites off larger fish—are commonly found where sweetlips gather; they're invited to enter the fishes' wide-open mouths to nibble at the leftovers there. Perhaps the puffer realized that to get access to the best cleaning station, he would have to join the crowd. And once he'd found his way to center stage and was accepted there, he simply stuck around.
paragraph 8,But there's a more fun explanation, one that would no doubt make any scientist balk. Let's say that by surrounding himself with all that color and beauty, the old puffer gave his sour mood a boost, buoying his lonesome self to that happy place where the best friendships are made.
(Excerpted from ,begin underline,Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom,end underline,. Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer S. Holland. Used by permission of Workman Publishing Co., Inc., New York. All rights reserved.)
Question
How does paragraph 3 ,begin emphasis,mainly,end emphasis, develop the author's ideas about the relationship between puffer fish and sweetlips?
Answer options with 4 options
1.
The paragraph proves that the relationship is extremely unlikely, as suggested in paragraph 2.
2.
The paragraph shows that scientific knowledge explains the relationship, as indicated in paragraph 4.
3.
The paragraph helps create a mental picture of the relationship, as it is described in paragraphs 5–6.
4.
The paragraph suggests there may be benefits to the relationship, as discussed in paragraphs 7–8.