This is scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

Mutual relationships are common throughout the animal kingdom. Fish called Ramora's get a tasty meal by picking bits of dead skin and parasites off of sharks, while the sharks enjoy their undersea spa treatment. Birds called oxpeckers gobble ticks off the skin of rhinos and zebras.

Pollinators like bees and butterflies help flowers to reproduce while getting a tasty treat.

And now we have evidence for an unusual mutual relationship between warthogs and banded mongooses.

Pacts of mongooses will pile onto warthogs to pick blood-filled ticks and other parasites

from the warthogs fur. The hogs get cleaned up while the

mongoose get fed. Everybody wins, well, except for the ticks.

Quite often the water will then lie down and actually sort of lift its legs and they'll swarm all over in these groups who've got for the 15 to 20 individuals and they can just cover the waterlogs.

Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Andy Plumtray, who documented the Whartogged

Mon Goose Mutualism in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park.

He published his observation in Suiform soundings, the newsletter of the International

Union for Conservation of Nature's Specialist Group for Wild Pigs, Peckeries, and Hippos. Mutualism is obviously common in nature, but it's uncommon

to find it between two different mammal species.

I've heard once of somebody who saw a red tail monkey grooming a juvenile chimpanzee.

After that article came out, somebody contacting the into dead scene,

vervet monkeys grooming impalors.

So such behavior obviously does occur among mammals, but seemingly rarely.

And the Warhog Mungus connection is the first example we know of that does not include

a primate.

So the longest researchers, they're all aware about it and will happily tell you about it.

Nobody seems to pick it up as a topic of research and actually looked at it in more detail.

For example, it's unclear if the interaction is instinctive or must be learned,

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