If you want to run a successful business, it’s important to provide a valuable service, advertise it well and do your best to get out what you put in. You should also try to make sure your customers don’t eat you.

This is especially true if you’re a cleaner shrimp. These industrious crustaceans set up cleaning stations — grooves in rocks in which they can retreat — in tropical coral reefs, where they pick parasites and dead skin off the fish, eels and turtles that seek them out for this purpose.

It’s a nutritious but dangerous job. Some of these clients — that’s the scientific term — are many times the shrimp’s size. And if such a client is hungry, it might start to see the little guy crawling all over it as less of a helper, and more of a snack.

What’s a hardworking shrimp to do? According to a paper published this week in Biology Letters, one species has a strategy: Choose your clients carefully and, when necessary, do a funky dance.