Moontanman

First of all I am indeed sure of clown fishes, you would have to specify the species of crab for me to be sure what example you are using, there are a great many with varying degrees of dependence on their hosts https://seaunseen.com/porcelain-anemone-crab/ . Cleaner wrasse https://seaunseen.com/cleaner-wrasse/ Cleaner goby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elacatinus Cleaner shrimp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenopus_hispidus is the one i am most familiar with but there are a great many of them, some only feed through cleaning and others do and don't. The Birds in the OP are not my cup of tea and I am relying much on the article but what makes me think this is different is this https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521143827.htm I would think that two species that share the same basic niche would compete rather than cooperate...

No they do not, anemonefish and anemone crabs or anemone hermit crabs cannot persist in the wild without their perspective symbiotes. If I must I can show you links to this but it is old and established science... Yes in fact obligate cleaners cannot persist without their main food source. It has been shown that removing the cleaners from a reef spells, if not doom, then unhealthy large fishes. Now some fish only do this cleaning thing during a small part of their lives and some even use the cleaning station as a ruse to bite chunks off bigger fish. Cleaner shrimp also depend on their hosts for food almost exclusively. The way these traits and actions evolved slowly over time can be shown, it's not a case of a fish choosing to clean a shark at the top point of a reef... No you do not, go back and check again... Now that is a new one! In captivity I have seen fish of wildly different species form what for lack of a better word a friendship..

I think it's more of a case of each using the other to their own ends. When a bait ball forms in the ocean via whatever method a great many animals will join in one the feast from baleen whales to tuna often at the same time but usually one species heards the bait fish into a ball at the surface and other animals take advantage of the opportunity. Two different species of birds actively cooperating to protect a common home range against invaders even of the same species is a bit more than than simply taking advantage of each other... The example of the OP is voluntary and depends on both species wanting it to happen. Lots of animals do that but the reasons are not as cut and dried as you seem to be indicating... Or ordered an elephant to save a buffalo? You mentioned clown fish and hermit crabs, neither of which are choices from individuals but examples of species developing cooperating systems over time via evolution. Even if you claim that the fish and the crabs are making a choice it's certain the anemones are not... Both of those examples are animals coevolving a relationship with no choice in the matter. I disagree, cleaning symbiosis is not a choice for any of the organisms involved, this behavior has evolved over millions of years. Some crab, shrimp, or fish didn't just decide to risk cleaning his own predators to see if they would cooperate. This behavior is quite complex for sure but it is innate, not a choice made by individuals... So you think clown fish can live in the ocean successfully without their symbionts? You do realise that many fishes show these relationships to some degree during some stage of their lives. Clown fish cannot survive without an anemone but an anemone can live quite well without clown fish.. Same is true for the crabs you mentioned. Agreed but the anemone fishes are just as obligate to their hosts. No it would not...

In examples as you have given the animals evolved their relationship over large stretches of time, they have no choice in the matter and cannot survive independant in the wild away from these relationships. The dolphin example I gave is of independent organisms choosing to work together for mutual benefit that normally do not associate with each other nor do they need to.

I have to agree the key word is choice, all of the examples you've alluded to so far seem to be short on the choice side... IMHO all the ones you offered are evolutionary instead of a choice... A choice would be closer to a pod of dolphins who cooperate fishing with humans and both are free not to do so but instead choose to do it. Of course this already exists but it is much closer to what the OP IMHO is talking about than clownfish and anemones or hermit crabs and anemones, neither of them is a choice for the animal but represent clearly established evolutionary relationship that comes about through mindless natural selection rather than choice...

Can you elaborate and give some examples?

Symbiotic relationships are not the same as two independent and equal species cooperating and living together by choice. The OP at least seems to be suggesting this...

I am not prepared to call human society a multi species society due to the fact that all the species we tolerate do not live independent lives separate from us and cooperating with us. If wild wolf packs lived among humans as separate and independent entities who would cooperate without losing their independence I would have to rethink this...

It would be the underwater equivalent of an industrial civilization, sorta like the idea of a planet that has organisms that live in a hydrogen atmosphere. We have done some really wild bioengineering in just a few thousand years. What could a civilization do over a much longer time period by just selective breeding? West of Eden by Harry Harrison does a pretty good job of speculating this idea.

Industry as we know it? Underwater octopus could develop technology based in biology instead of iron steel or fire.

Since we are deep into speculation land I like to speculate, let's imply the octopus as the creature and it's civilization as biological instead of technological, ie the octopus society commands biology much the same way we use technology. Since they live in shallow coastal seas have no hard body parts fossils are non existent so they do not leave behind anything we would recognise as technology. The octopus society could have been world wide and their impact would be as invisible in the fossil record as they are. Possibly the modern octopus is to them as chimps are to us. Any add ons to this sculpture?

I used to work with a guy who could be a stand in for a neanderthal, he had the pronounced eye ridges, sloping forehead, goofy grin, even an apparent occipital bun... I reminded him of it nearly every day... He is dead now, I miss him and his big grin, great guy.. Hmmm... it seems there is some consensus that Neanderthals were mostly carnivores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_behavior Oh come on, I know you guys wanted to hear it!

And then you surf...

You do make a point, several other species of humans did at one time exist, why were we successful and they are gone? Evolution does indeed favor organisms that are just good enough, all you have to do is be able to reproduce, no one on one battles with cave lions except in Conan novels... WOW! I'd like to see the flow chart on that conclusion... This is such bullshit, I live where i can drive to a large game lands area and see adult eastern diamondback rattlesnakes. I have caught enormous rattle snakes, well over six feet long, huge fangs, huge venom glands, and yet living after being bitten even without anti venom is more likely than not. Corals snakes are tiny in comparison and I am far more cautious with them than I am with the rattle snakes. Rattlesnakes can BTW control the amount of venom they inject and dry bites are not uncommon... A big venomous snake is always far more dangerous than it's babies, it's just an old wives tale... In the interest of full disclosure we do have a pygmy rattlesnake here that looks like a baby snake but packs a wallop in it's bite. It should also be said that you don't need to be superman to reproduce, a human smart enough to avoid all contact with those cave lions is more likely to survive than the guy who looks for trouble to impress the ladies... too kool four skool...

I'm an alien drone from Titan, damn it's hot here, don't you guys ever crank up the AC?

Nothing funnier than suspending the laws of physics...

Some birds have been found to cooperate in multi species group that guards against invasion from other birds new to the area of both species! https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521143827.htm

Even some animals have a sense of fairness ingrained in them but your post pretty much sums it up, Do not think that if you had been born a long time ago you would have thought slavery was unethical, you might have not liked it, especially if you were a slave, but even slaves could be convinced of the ethics of holding slaves, ethics is fluid to your own experiences...

And what ,if anything, does that have to do with the price of eggs in china? Traces of carbon in rocks no matter how old is not evidence for a civilization... Quite a bit more evidence would be required to detect a civilization. Our own existence is a a couple million years tops and still very rare, another 500 million years and what traces would be found? Those swords and muskets would last far less than a few tens of thousands of years. In fact stone tools would outlast them by an order of magnitude at least... Think for instance of a stone blade found in a coal seam, who would find it? A miner or a person loading their furnace? It's already happened! A brass object, a bell I think, has been found entombed in coal.. what does this mean? I can think of a couple ways that bell ended up in coal. do you think a researcher who was given this bell would even consider it was made by a civilization in the carboniferous? This is a real problem, a civilization from that far back would have left precious few surviving artifacts and most researchers would assume they are not what they appear to be...

Can you tell me where your ethics came from?

Not my morning evidently, coffee is required for thinking, Unless you know of an objective ethics someplace we can only have ethics when we agree on what it is..

Not finding them would be the point and what we consider is a moot point. Humans subducted into the mantle would be difficult to find no matter how they were entered and they might consider burying their dead to be a last ditch effort in the total absence of wood to build a fire. Fossils are extremely rare objects, we have only a few bones of many species and burying something in the ground doesn't insure it will be a fossil. Think of a T-Rex, super predator! Vicious killer of even bigger herbivores, how many complete fossil skeletons would you think have been found? Thousands? Hundreds? Try dozens, maybe 4 dozen and most are just bit and pieces that if we hadn't found more complete skeletons we wouldn't even know what they were part of. The further back you go the worse the data gets. One super predator from the burgess shale was originally thought to be three different animals for many years. The fossil record is an amazing thing but horribly incomplete... We discovered a tiny shard of zircon on a very old very tiny rock, I'd take your bet. Actually yes, plate tectonics is a magic eraser, nearly all of Earth's surface has been "magically erased" at some point much of it many times.

I didn't say the ethics of the majority are ethical to everyone, nor did I claim to have any ethical view, but if you were raised in a society that told you your whole life it was ethical to kill everyone's first born then you would believe that to be ethical, you might personally object, it's unlikely if you were raised to believe it, but it would be considered ethical by your society. Their are societies even today that consider somethings to be ethical that we would probably not consider ethical.

Maybe, like humans, they would assume there were omnivores, hooves to not a plant eater make...