Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick. This episode of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and I suppose the next
Speaker 1: one as well will be dealing with gray whales. This
Speaker 1: is a topic that I was inspired to cover because
Speaker 1: my family was fortunate enough to get to go on
Speaker 1: a trip to Mexico, to the Mexican state of Baja California,
Speaker 1: sir to one of the breeding lagoons that the gray
Speaker 1: whales migrate too every year. Specifically, we went to Ojo
Speaker 1: Delia Bray Lagoon. That means I of the hair due
Speaker 1: to the way it's it's shaped. And yeah, I got
Speaker 1: to see these magnificent animals close up, got to observe
Speaker 1: them for a couple of days. It was. It was
Speaker 1: absolutely fantastic and certainly ignited my curiosity about these creatures.
Speaker 1: I didn't get to see your photos because I'm not
Speaker 1: on the gram, but Rachel was raving about them to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll once this episode comes out off to share some
Speaker 1: maybe in the discussion module the Facebook group or our
Speaker 1: discord for the show, and if you don't have access
Speaker 1: to those. Just email us and and well we'll hook
Speaker 1: you up. But yeah, a lot. I got some great footage,
Speaker 1: my wife got some great footage, and and more than anything,
Speaker 1: we just got to take in this amazing location, this
Speaker 1: amazing landscape, and these amazing animals. So this lagoon is
Speaker 1: one of their calving grounds and you were out in
Speaker 1: boats getting to observe them right up close right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this um, this is one of several different lagoons where
Speaker 1: where where this particular population goes to. When we were
Speaker 1: visiting there, there were hundreds of whales present in this lagoon.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty vast lagoon. Um, it's surrounded on all
Speaker 1: sides with this kind of desolate and haunting landscape that's
Speaker 1: full of like salt, sand and bramble. I mean, it's there.
Speaker 1: There are organisms they're either coyotes around and and other creatures,
Speaker 1: but it's um, it's it's a unique landscape. Like just
Speaker 1: flying into Guerrera Negro, the nearest town, was was really
Speaker 1: breathtaking just because the landscape is so beautiful. But the
Speaker 1: first morning we went out on these boats, they were
Speaker 1: also these intense photam organa mirages on the horizon that
Speaker 1: really added to the surreal feel of the place. What
Speaker 1: were they like images out they look like mountains or
Speaker 1: they were the surrounding um mountain, like some of the
Speaker 1: peaks that were visible on the and also some of
Speaker 1: the dunes, so like dunes and peaks. So yeah, it
Speaker 1: was and it looked like floating islands on the horizon. Wow.
Speaker 1: And then of course closer in you have all of
Speaker 1: these breaching whales and spy hopping whales and it's it's amazing. Now.
Speaker 1: I do want to stress that in this particular situation,
Speaker 1: only a few boats were permitted on the water at
Speaker 1: a time. There was no chasing of the whales. There
Speaker 1: was no feeding of the whales. Um they don't eat
Speaker 1: while they are there, and we'll get into the reasons
Speaker 1: for this as we move through these episodes. But but
Speaker 1: there's no need to chase, and there's no need to
Speaker 1: it to try and bait them in, because they're very curious.
Speaker 1: They come up to the boats, they inspect the boats,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they're obviously scraping their skin against the holes
Speaker 1: of the boats to perhaps to relieve themselves with some
Speaker 1: of the parasites that they have, the exoparasites and we'll
Speaker 1: discuss that as well in probably in well in this episode. Actually,
Speaker 1: other times, though they're not scraping against the boats. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they're just kind of pushing them around a little bit,
Speaker 1: like playing with them, I guess, to try and figure
Speaker 1: out what their mind might be. Other times they're they're
Speaker 1: just kind of breaching a little bit. They're spy hopping. Um,
Speaker 1: they and they seem to have some sort of interest
Speaker 1: in what's going on in the boats or with the
Speaker 1: boats humans will reach out and touch them, and it
Speaker 1: seems like the whales like this on some level. Um,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's it's a very very very strange situation,
Speaker 1: Like it feels kind of like certainly there's a sense
Speaker 1: of curiosity on both sides, but there's also this, you know,
Speaker 1: if you want to get spiritual about it, there's almost
Speaker 1: this feeling of communion. So sometimes they'll kind of bring
Speaker 1: part of their body out of the water or breach.
Speaker 1: But also you said spy hopping is that when they
Speaker 1: raise their eyes above the water level to see what's
Speaker 1: above the surface. Well, in other species, such as the
Speaker 1: orca um, there's there's definitely more of an eye coming
Speaker 1: above the water. With the with the gray whales, they're
Speaker 1: not even necessarily getting their eyes above water, so it's, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I think it's there. There's some differing takes
Speaker 1: on why exactly they're doing this, but they'll, yeah, they'll
Speaker 1: kind of spy hoop next to the boat, and they're
Speaker 1: spy hopping out further away from the boats as well,
Speaker 1: and um and then yea, sometimes they're rolling around in
Speaker 1: the water and kind of and you'll even like look
Speaker 1: into their eye that sometimes they are looking up through
Speaker 1: the water at you, and that's one of those moments
Speaker 1: where you're just you know, you're you're you're thinking about
Speaker 1: like what are they seeing? What are they possibly thinking
Speaker 1: as they look up at us? What do they think
Speaker 1: we are? And then you also look at this whale
Speaker 1: and you just, man, I was just thinking, like they've
Speaker 1: they've seen things I can't even imagine, you know, And
Speaker 1: this this particular whale is going to see things just
Speaker 1: in the months ahead that I can scarcely imagine. So
Speaker 1: I'm very envious of this experience. And uh, and I
Speaker 1: would love to see gray whales up close one day too,
Speaker 1: But I have seen plenty of video footage and at
Speaker 1: least from what I've seen several things stand out. One
Speaker 1: that they kind of I don't know if this makes
Speaker 1: any sense, but they look more like rocks than any
Speaker 1: other type of whale I can think of having seen,
Speaker 1: and that may be aided by the many barnacles attached
Speaker 1: to the outside of them, which, as we'll talk about
Speaker 1: later on, very characteristic of the species of whale, having
Speaker 1: a lot of barnacle loading on the outside. But in
Speaker 1: looking at them, they can look very much like a
Speaker 1: large gray boulder covered in lichen, almost where the barnacles
Speaker 1: are kind of like the lichen patches, or at least
Speaker 1: it seemed that way to me. M And then the
Speaker 1: other thing being that their nostrils look very uh more
Speaker 1: typically mammalian rather than the blow a hole that you
Speaker 1: would see on the back of a lot of whales,
Speaker 1: where you might perceive at least as a single blowhole. Uh.
Speaker 1: The gray whale nostrils I recall seeing are very distinctly
Speaker 1: separate nostrils that kind of flare more like a dog's
Speaker 1: nostrils might. Oh yeah, yeah, this this is not your
Speaker 1: your cartoon whale. You have those those very nostril like
Speaker 1: blow holes on top of the head, and you if
Speaker 1: you're if you're out on one of these lagoons, you
Speaker 1: see see that a lot. In fact, a lot of
Speaker 1: people end up getting spre You're constantly misted by the
Speaker 1: spray from them, even if they're not super close to
Speaker 1: the boats, just because you know they're they're just kind
Speaker 1: and up they're they're blowing that blow hole. There's this
Speaker 1: mist in the air of water and also I guess
Speaker 1: probably some some whale snut in there as well. But
Speaker 1: they do have to your point, they do have this
Speaker 1: kind of rocky appearance. Part of it's the barnacle load,
Speaker 1: but also that their their their skin is very modeled
Speaker 1: and um and scarred, and it could look like it
Speaker 1: is it is stone um. When if you do touch it,
Speaker 1: I thought that it felt more or less like a
Speaker 1: big eggplant. That's the kind of feeling I've had from it,
Speaker 1: Like there's a little like there's a softness to it,
Speaker 1: but it is also you know, it's like a that's
Speaker 1: kind of wet suit feeling as well. Oh, another thing
Speaker 1: about their skin is I and will come back to this,
Speaker 1: but I was surprised by their whiskers. We've talked on
Speaker 1: the show before about the evolution of whales and the
Speaker 1: loss of body hair. So I wasn't prepared for the whiskers.
Speaker 1: Somehow I missed this in leading up to this whale experience.
Speaker 1: But they have quite a few whiskers. Um the other
Speaker 1: thing that I was surprised about, because I'm some level,
Speaker 1: I was prepared for this gentleness, So I was prepared
Speaker 1: for this curiosity. I knew what I was getting into
Speaker 1: with that. But but also you would you would see
Speaker 1: them moving underneath the water. And these are big animals.
Speaker 1: They're we're talking uh, fourteen point nine meters or forty
Speaker 1: nine feet in length, weights of up to forty one
Speaker 1: tons or so. So these are like school bus sized organisms,
Speaker 1: and they're they're often very curious and gentle next to
Speaker 1: the boat, but they can they can move with such
Speaker 1: speed and strength, and you see that occasionally, especially when
Speaker 1: they're engaging and mating behavior further away from the boats,
Speaker 1: they'll they'll surge underneath the water, and you're reminded just
Speaker 1: how how powerful and how potentially um destructive these creatures
Speaker 1: are if they had have they had reason to be
Speaker 1: destructive towards you. You know, it's funny. This reminds me
Speaker 1: of all these passages in Moby Dick describing whales. We
Speaker 1: know now from plenty of examples like this, just like
Speaker 1: as a matter of habit do not seem to attack
Speaker 1: humans or do anything very aggressive, at least not most
Speaker 1: of the time. But described in these older documents with
Speaker 1: absolute horror, just like these whales are monsters. They are killers.
Speaker 1: They will crush you, they will swallow you whole. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and in fact I ran across this wonderful description. This
Speaker 1: is from a paper in The American Naturalist from eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight by J. D. Katon, titled the California gray Whale.
Speaker 1: The author writes, quote, of all the known species of whales,
Speaker 1: this is the most cunning, courageous, and vicious. So terrible
Speaker 1: is it that, with the old implements of harpoon and lance,
Speaker 1: but few whalemen would court an encounter with it, and
Speaker 1: it early received the name of the devil fish. I
Speaker 1: have no account that it ever maliciously attacked an unoffending object,
Speaker 1: Yet when it found it self pursued where escape was difficult,
Speaker 1: even before it was struck, it has been known to
Speaker 1: turn upon pursuers and dash a boat to fragments with
Speaker 1: a single blow. Of its powerful flukes, and so has
Speaker 1: many a life been lost? Okay, well, at least this
Speaker 1: source acknowledges that this kind of behavior would be like
Speaker 1: in response to extreme distress, like when the whale is
Speaker 1: being attacked. Yeah. Yeah, he is acknowledging that like this,
Speaker 1: this is aggression that's coming out of obvious whaling scenarios. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know you the sad fact is, and especially
Speaker 1: this in the show before, you can't you can't remove
Speaker 1: whaling from our understanding of these creatures. I mean that
Speaker 1: the history is intertwined there with our understanding of the organism,
Speaker 1: and so we have various things where the name comes
Speaker 1: from whaler observations, like, for instance, whale lice, which will
Speaker 1: discuss they're not actually lice, but whalers compare them to lice,
Speaker 1: and that's where the name comes from. I do believe
Speaker 1: gray whales specifically are thought to have once been much
Speaker 1: more abundant, right, but that whaling in particular reduced their
Speaker 1: populations to present levels where there's a sustainable number of
Speaker 1: gray whales in the population on the western coast of
Speaker 1: the American continent, but the population that lives on the
Speaker 1: other side of the Pacific on the eastern coast of
Speaker 1: the Asian Mainland is much more reduced, but in both
Speaker 1: cases reduced by whaling. Yeah, and then there was once
Speaker 1: a North Atlantic gray whale population. These were thought to
Speaker 1: have fed around Newfoundland, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Iceland,
Speaker 1: and Europe's North North Sea and for their winter breeding
Speaker 1: lagoons or refuges. It's thought that they might have visited
Speaker 1: the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas here in the States,
Speaker 1: as well as uncertain spots along the coast of Spain, Portugal,
Speaker 1: and Morocco. But this population was essentially extinct by the
Speaker 1: late seventeen and early eighteenth centuries do at least in
Speaker 1: part to whaling. Interestingly enough, there have been proposals to
Speaker 1: try and introduce reintroduce the North Pacific gray whale into
Speaker 1: this region to restore the population. And I've also seen
Speaker 1: speculations about what might occur in the future due to
Speaker 1: climate change, that as we have less sea ice, it
Speaker 1: might enable the gray whales on their own to recolonize
Speaker 1: this part of the ocean. I guess it would be
Speaker 1: very difficult and expensive to try to force a recolonization
Speaker 1: by human intervention, Yeah, because I mean nothing else. We're
Speaker 1: talking about enormous creatures and how are you going to
Speaker 1: get them there? I didn't, I didn't look super hard
Speaker 1: at the proposals. They may have a very straightforward solution
Speaker 1: to this. I'm not sure if they would be airlifting
Speaker 1: them or shipping them across land or exactly what the
Speaker 1: scenario is, but it has not become an actionable thing
Speaker 1: at least yet. Well, let's talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about the physical characteristics of the gray whale here. Because
Speaker 1: I guess we are um an audio program. You can
Speaker 1: certainly look up lots of great images and footage and illustrations. Uh.
Speaker 1: One of the books that was one of my my
Speaker 1: prime sources here as a book by Mark Carwardine, The
Speaker 1: Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises of the World. Highly
Speaker 1: recommend this book for anyone out there who's into whales,
Speaker 1: dolphins and porpoises. Fabulous illustrations and some great photographs and
Speaker 1: just lots of wonderful information, uh that you know, can
Speaker 1: aid you just sort of in general general interest in
Speaker 1: these organisms or if you're into citing them and has
Speaker 1: like you know, how to how to pick out these
Speaker 1: various creatures, by their markings, by their their spouts, by
Speaker 1: their flukes, that sort of thing. So that's going to
Speaker 1: be one of the books I'm going to keep referring
Speaker 1: back to, for sure. But getting back to what we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier. Yes, these are these are whales.
Speaker 1: These are large creatures, large whales. By some rankings, I
Speaker 1: think they're only the eighth largest whale species. But considering
Speaker 1: that number one, the blue whale, is the largest animal
Speaker 1: that's ever lived, there's not really no shame in coming
Speaker 1: at a number eight. Gray whale can reach forty nine
Speaker 1: feet in length. That's the fourteen point nine meters way,
Speaker 1: about forty tons. The females are larger than the males,
Speaker 1: and even the newborns are approximately fourteen to sixteen feet long.
Speaker 1: It's roughly four point two to four point eight meters
Speaker 1: in wigh, around two thousand pounds or around nine hundred
Speaker 1: and seven kilograms, So we're talking about big creatures here.
Speaker 1: Cannot stress that enough, And I guess it's helpful that
Speaker 1: the newborn calves are already big because it's when a
Speaker 1: whale is young that it's most susceptible to predators like
Speaker 1: the predation on adult gray whales, from what I understand,
Speaker 1: is pretty rare, whereas attempts by animals such as orcas
Speaker 1: to prey on the calves is pretty common. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the healthy adult whale is a healthy adult gray
Speaker 1: whale is a formidable opponent unless conditions are just right.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, uh, the the young are going
Speaker 1: to be the primary focal point of predators. Okay, so
Speaker 1: we've established they're big, we should also come back to
Speaker 1: the fact that, yes, they are more or less gray
Speaker 1: in color, often look like just a big old slab
Speaker 1: of granite, kind of like an obelisk in the water. Yes. Now,
Speaker 1: one initial question that came up for me, of course,
Speaker 1: especially as we were dealing in our notes here, is
Speaker 1: it gray g R E y or is it g
Speaker 1: r A y um. I generally assume those spellings are interchangeable.
Speaker 1: It's like American English or British English. That's how yeah,
Speaker 1: ye read it. Yeah, and that's one of the main distinctions.
Speaker 1: Um Mark Carterwine in his book stresses that that either
Speaker 1: is correct. You know, obviously gry is more common in
Speaker 1: British English and gray is more common in American English.
Speaker 1: And generally we're referring to what has perceived to be
Speaker 1: the color of the creature, though much of its gray
Speaker 1: appearance is due to those accumulated barnacles, skin lesions scarring
Speaker 1: their actual skin, though is still often described as light
Speaker 1: to dark gray, or maybe a gray brown. However, it's
Speaker 1: also acceptable to consider that we dubbed them gray whales
Speaker 1: in reference to British zoologist John Edward Gray Gray, who
Speaker 1: lived eighteen hundred through eighteen seventy five, who placed the
Speaker 1: whale in its own genus in eighteen sixty four. On
Speaker 1: top of that, its scientific name is as Richtius robustus,
Speaker 1: referring to nineteenth century Danish zoologist Frederick Estricht who lived
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety eight through eighteen sixty three. So it could
Speaker 1: have been the Eshricht whale. We we're glad that it's
Speaker 1: the gray whale. Yeah, yeah, rolls off the tongue for
Speaker 1: us at any rate, a little, a little easier. It's
Speaker 1: been known by other names, of course, the gray back,
Speaker 1: the muscle digger, the mud digger, the scrag whale, ripsack, hardhead,
Speaker 1: and of course by American whalers the devil fish. That
Speaker 1: was the one referenced in that they quote from the
Speaker 1: article in the American Naturalists from the nineteenth century. Correct. Yes,
Speaker 1: now there are no recognized forms or subspecies, though there
Speaker 1: are two possible sub populations according to Carwadine, So we
Speaker 1: have the eastern North Pacific and the western North Pacific
Speaker 1: gray whale. But there also seems to be some cross
Speaker 1: breeding between these two populations in the Mexican lagoons. Now
Speaker 1: again you can put all of your sort of cartoon
Speaker 1: whale appearances to the side, because the reality is somewhat different,
Speaker 1: not only with the blowholes, but for starters, we should
Speaker 1: point out that this is a baleen whale, not a
Speaker 1: toothed whale. Baleen whales were once toothed whales earlier on
Speaker 1: in their evolution, and we do have fossil evidence of
Speaker 1: whales with both teeth and baleen, but they have adapted.
Speaker 1: The gray whales have adapted to thrive as pure filter feeders.
Speaker 1: So the baleen is a bristly material that lives inside
Speaker 1: the whale's mouth which they use to filter feed by. Well,
Speaker 1: there are various different ways the different species do it,
Speaker 1: but by by forcing water through these sort of sieves.
Speaker 1: Natural biological sieves the billing hares which capture the plankton
Speaker 1: or the krill, or the small bits of organic matter
Speaker 1: that the whales live on. Yeah. Yeah, and it's like
Speaker 1: these these keratin baleen plates. And this is something I
Speaker 1: hadn't given a lot of thought to before. But there
Speaker 1: are different strategies to use with your baling. There are
Speaker 1: two main strategies. Two of the main strategies anywhere, gulping
Speaker 1: and straining, both carried out near the water surface by
Speaker 1: different species of whales. Baleen whales, like right whales, will
Speaker 1: slim swim through clouds of krill, open mouth, skimming them
Speaker 1: from the water. Meanwhile, fin whales gulp up water full
Speaker 1: of fish and or krill and then push the water
Speaker 1: out as if through a sieve. But the gray whales
Speaker 1: are different. They're the only modern baleen whale that dives
Speaker 1: down deep, and I mean this is deep relative to
Speaker 1: the waters they inhabit. These are not deep water whales.
Speaker 1: They're not like sperm whales. They tend to stick to
Speaker 1: coastal regions and the continental shelf, but they'll go down
Speaker 1: deep for these regions and they'll feed as bottom feeders.
Speaker 1: They'll turn on one side, and interestingly they are there
Speaker 1: is like a right handedness to the gray whales. Most
Speaker 1: whales seem to favor their right side, but some do
Speaker 1: left instead, and they'll vacuum the water up, vacuum up water, mud, sand,
Speaker 1: and most importantly various organisms there in the muck. And
Speaker 1: then they'll use their tongue to push out the mud,
Speaker 1: sand and water, but retain all these little organisms and
Speaker 1: things they can digest in their billing. Yeah, and it's interesting,
Speaker 1: apparently you can tell which side a particular gray whale
Speaker 1: favors because the side it favors is generally more scraped
Speaker 1: up and deep barnacled, because that's the side that goes
Speaker 1: down in plows into the ocean floor. And also their
Speaker 1: baleen plates are shorter than in other extent whales. So
Speaker 1: these other baleen whales that use different feeding techniques, I
Speaker 1: think they tend to have longer balin for straining out
Speaker 1: the things that they need to eat. Now, as for
Speaker 1: what they're eating out of the muck, Carveting points out
Speaker 1: that a good eighty species of fish and invertebrates have
Speaker 1: been identified as gray whale prey. However, most of the
Speaker 1: prey that they consume consists of benthic and planktonic organisms.
Speaker 1: Planktonic meaning, of course, plankton and benthic organisms being various
Speaker 1: isopods that live abundantly in the sand. Apparently benthic amphipods
Speaker 1: make up a good ninety percent of their diet. But
Speaker 1: they're they're reasonably opportunistic and may also be shifting their
Speaker 1: foraging habits in Arctic waters due to climate change. So basically,
Speaker 1: my understanding based on the they're reading here, is like
Speaker 1: they're they're going down to the mud and the muck
Speaker 1: and the sand to get most of their food, but
Speaker 1: if they happen to encounter some sort of plankton on
Speaker 1: the way up, you know they're gonna breathe it in.
Speaker 1: They're gonna they're gonna go ahead and take that in
Speaker 1: as well. They're typically diving down thirty to sixty meters,
Speaker 1: but they may go up to one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: or even one hundred and seventy, and again, opportunistic feeding
Speaker 1: may happen at any depth, but the seabed is their
Speaker 1: main target now. The summer is their prime feeding period,
Speaker 1: and of course they're large whales. They're eating large meals.
Speaker 1: They'll eat anywhere from like one to one point three
Speaker 1: tons of the stuff per day, and the remainder of
Speaker 1: the year entails a lot of fasting, including their migrations
Speaker 1: to and from these calving and mating lagoons. Okay, so
Speaker 1: they typically are going to be stocking up on food,
Speaker 1: they're eating, they're they're banging their heads into the sediment
Speaker 1: up in the Arctic waters, and then they migrate down
Speaker 1: south for calving and rearing young. Yeah. Yeah, and um, yeah,
Speaker 1: so you might think of them as just this kind
Speaker 1: of enormous freight train of a creature that sucks up
Speaker 1: mud and anything in the mud in the sand from
Speaker 1: you know, from the waters that they inhabit and just
Speaker 1: eat all summer long, Yeah, and then go go south
Speaker 1: for the winter. Kind of the catfish of whales. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are. I thought about this as well. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: kind of because the catfish for the bottom feeders, I
Speaker 1: grew up around and grew up here in about and
Speaker 1: so yeah, they're they're kind of using the catfish strategy,
Speaker 1: but on an epic scale. But don't try to go
Speaker 1: noodling for gray whales. No, No, that doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: a good idea now once a moll note, I think
Speaker 1: I did read that there are some accepts. There seems
Speaker 1: to be some evidence that there are some whales that
Speaker 1: stay north for an extended period of time, but in
Speaker 1: general we see this migration occurring. Other important physical notes,
Speaker 1: just to describe them, they have slender and small heads
Speaker 1: even in relation to their body size, certainly when you
Speaker 1: compare them to amously big headed whales like the sperm whale,
Speaker 1: a toothed whale. They have a stocky body with a
Speaker 1: hump two thirds of the way down their back, along
Speaker 1: with eight to fourteen quote unquote knuckles Further down. They
Speaker 1: don't have a dorsal fin. They just have a small hump.
Speaker 1: And like I mentioned earlier, they have whiskers, and apparently
Speaker 1: they have more whiskers than any other whale. I was
Speaker 1: not prepared for this, but the whiskers are very prominent,
Speaker 1: and I was reading about this on the NAA website
Speaker 1: and they point out that these are more or less
Speaker 1: like the whiskers you'd encounter on any mammal. They are
Speaker 1: tactile sensors. Now Carveting notes that in the older whales,
Speaker 1: though many of these whiskers are quote unquote obliterated by
Speaker 1: scarring and barnacles. However, wow, if the barnacles are in
Speaker 1: some cases obliterating their sensory organs, I feel like that
Speaker 1: that offers some input on question we're going to address
Speaker 1: in a minute, which is about these barnacles. Now, we
Speaker 1: mentioned them earlier, but they are a very your feature
Speaker 1: that people notice when they look at gray whales. It
Speaker 1: looks horrible. Some people think, you know, they look at
Speaker 1: this and they're like, oh my god, these poor whales.
Speaker 1: This must be a purely parasitic infestation where where the
Speaker 1: whale is dying because of all these barnacles on it.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's it's more of an open question
Speaker 1: exactly what the symbiotic relationship between the whales and their
Speaker 1: barnacles is. Is it parasitism, is it mutualism? Is it
Speaker 1: a commensalism commensalism where the barnacle would get a benefit,
Speaker 1: but it just doesn't really matter to the whale. We're
Speaker 1: going to address that in a minute. Yeah, it's I
Speaker 1: know some of you might be thinking like, I just
Speaker 1: want to hear about the gray whales. I don't want
Speaker 1: to hear about the barnacles. I don't want to hear
Speaker 1: about the worka but but if there's the thing, you
Speaker 1: can't talk about the gray whale without talking about the orca,
Speaker 1: which will probably get into more in the second episode.
Speaker 1: And you can't talk about them without talking about their
Speaker 1: barnacles because they're just so so much a part of
Speaker 1: who they are and when what they look like. Now
Speaker 1: there again, there may be, like you said, there may
Speaker 1: be a little more nuanced to exactly what the relationship
Speaker 1: might be between the barnacles and the whale lice and
Speaker 1: the whales, but for the most part, they're often referred
Speaker 1: to as exoparasites, so we're going to probably keep using
Speaker 1: that term, even if we're going to, you know, put
Speaker 1: an asterisk by it and come back to it. They
Speaker 1: do have quite an exoparasite load. Newborns are born without
Speaker 1: any barnacles, without any lice. They're an almost uniform dark gray,
Speaker 1: almost black color, so aside from being smaller, you can
Speaker 1: definitely identify them in the water based on their coloration,
Speaker 1: but they swiftly obtain these parasites as well. In addition
Speaker 1: to of course scarring from not only the parasites but
Speaker 1: also from threats and feeding. It gives them a very
Speaker 1: highly variable appearance, and by feeding, I mean their own feeding,
Speaker 1: going down and scraping themselves against the bottom of the
Speaker 1: sea floor. Before we get into the barnacle, though, I
Speaker 1: want to talk to just a little bit about the
Speaker 1: whale lice, because this is all part of the exo
Speaker 1: parasite load, which according to it to Carbondine, adult gray
Speaker 1: whales carry more exo parasites than any other whale species
Speaker 1: on average, more than one hundred and eighty kilograms or
Speaker 1: three hundred and ninety six pounds of the stuff, So
Speaker 1: they get a lot living on them. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: didn't do a breakdown of like how how that would
Speaker 1: that would that sort of parasite load would be like
Speaker 1: for the human body. But I think a lot of
Speaker 1: our repulsion to barnacles and these these these rather large
Speaker 1: whale lies is that. Yeah, we think about ourselves, we
Speaker 1: think about our pets, and if those were on us,
Speaker 1: obviously we would want them remove pronto. Hold on, rob
Speaker 1: I just tried to do the math on the on
Speaker 1: the loading of the barnacles and whale license stuff by weight.
Speaker 1: So if we're saying that adult gray whales can grow
Speaker 1: up to a out forty tons, which is eighty thousand pounds,
Speaker 1: and then you compare that to you said they could
Speaker 1: have up to what like almost four hundred pounds of
Speaker 1: loading of barnicles and stuff. That is about half a
Speaker 1: percent of the body weight. So if you translate that
Speaker 1: to a human, I don't know, a human somebody weighs
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty pounds, what's half of one percent
Speaker 1: of that body weight on the outside of them? Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Its having like, you know, three quarters
Speaker 1: of a pound of parasites on the outside of you.
Speaker 1: That bad. I don't know how many barnacles would that be?
Speaker 1: I don't know. M Let's say it's one barnacle which
Speaker 1: you put up with. That's way more than one barnicle'
Speaker 1: that's a number of barnacles. Well, I'm being generous here.
Speaker 1: Let's let's go ahead and pare it down to just one,
Speaker 1: maybe two barnacles. I feel like that would still feel
Speaker 1: like one or two barnacles too many for us. But
Speaker 1: then again, we don't live in the ocean. We don't
Speaker 1: have barnicles, so it's not appropriate for us to really
Speaker 1: make judgment calls like this. Okay, Well, apologies for the
Speaker 1: rough math. I may have screwed something up there, but
Speaker 1: of it I tried. Now I think you captured the
Speaker 1: general feel of it, because again we have to think
Speaker 1: about just how big these creatures are, and as we'll
Speaker 1: probably get into the barnacles or not covering them head
Speaker 1: to toe. It's not like a suit of barnacles. They
Speaker 1: tend to be clusters in certain places like top of
Speaker 1: the head, right behind the head, and some in other places. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they got patches, little colonies. Yeah. Yeah, they have to
Speaker 1: keep a low profile to keep from being pulled off
Speaker 1: by the water. Though again they'll they'll often scrape against things,
Speaker 1: and I'm off the top of my head, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if they're necessarily scratching to remove themselves, remove the
Speaker 1: barnacles from their body, or if they're dealing with like
Speaker 1: general skin discomfort or it has to do with the lice, etc.
Speaker 1: But they end up scraping off the barnacles. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: one whale that we saw scraping against the bottom of
Speaker 1: the boat, there would be this colossal scraping sound and
Speaker 1: then like a cloud of pieces of barnacle and like
Speaker 1: I guess, maybe some dried skin and probably some loose
Speaker 1: whale lice would come floating up through the water. That
Speaker 1: is gross. But to remind again you said earlier, I
Speaker 1: think you said that the lice on these whales are
Speaker 1: not actually lice in the sense that we usually mean
Speaker 1: like the parasitic insects that can be found on land mammals. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we call them lies because whalers saw them on the
Speaker 1: bodies of the whales they were slaughtering, and they were
Speaker 1: they just made the you know, I guess a natural
Speaker 1: comparison to be made to lyce that occur on human bodies,
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh, well, those are whale lies. But
Speaker 1: they're they're not lies. They're actually a type of crustacean
Speaker 1: that's related more to the skeleton shrimp, an organism we've
Speaker 1: talked about on the show before. So what are the
Speaker 1: so called lice doing on these whales? Okay, So, if
Speaker 1: you pick up Carbadine's book, and again I recommend it
Speaker 1: for whale fans out there, he has illustrations of all
Speaker 1: four species of whale lies that you'll find on the
Speaker 1: gray whale. Three of them are are only found on
Speaker 1: gray whales, and then there's another variety that is found
Speaker 1: on gray whales and bowhead whales. But yeah, they're these
Speaker 1: They get kind of big. They can be anywhere between
Speaker 1: three and thirty millimeters long, so at the largest a
Speaker 1: little over an inch. A lot of the photographs you
Speaker 1: see of the barnacles on the bodies of gray whales,
Speaker 1: you can also see the lice clustered around them. They
Speaker 1: have this kind of the kind of like these kind
Speaker 1: of ridges on their bodies, though they may not be
Speaker 1: moving during the footage. They may live in populations of
Speaker 1: up to seventy five hundred on a single whale, and
Speaker 1: they generally live and die on the same whale, though
Speaker 1: there is some degree of transference that takes place when
Speaker 1: the whales are in close confinance with each other. But
Speaker 1: they have no free swimming stage in their development, No,
Speaker 1: no stage in their development in which they're swimming free
Speaker 1: and they're running across other whales. If they're going to
Speaker 1: jump ship, they've got to like jump ship straight to
Speaker 1: another whale. Yeah, but all this, like the brand ending
Speaker 1: of whale lies, it just made me sort of automatically assume, well,
Speaker 1: they're drinking whale blood. Clearly, that's what they're doing, but
Speaker 1: that's not what they're doing. Carboding notes that they don't
Speaker 1: drink blood. They eat whale skin that's come off just
Speaker 1: you know, like like old essentially like eating dry skin,
Speaker 1: except in the water. They're possibly eating a little bit
Speaker 1: of bacteria and algae as well, and they'll also eat
Speaker 1: damage tissue. So carboding, writes quote. Though usually considered parasites,
Speaker 1: they might be more accurately described as cleaning symbians awsome,
Speaker 1: maybe providing a benefit to the whale. Yeah, yeah, now,
Speaker 1: it's it's still worth noting that if there is an
Speaker 1: excessively large population, that might be an indicator of poor
Speaker 1: health for an individual whale. But you know, that's you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: if an organism is in poor health, a lot of
Speaker 1: things are going to be out of whack, including the
Speaker 1: amount of creatures living on its hide. Yes, and that's
Speaker 1: true for organisms living on and in all kinds of
Speaker 1: other larger organisms. It's true for us, like our gut
Speaker 1: microbiome is useful to us. All of those bacteria in
Speaker 1: our guts are helpful, but if there something goes wrong
Speaker 1: with our immune system, they can turn opportunistic. Absolutely. Now,
Speaker 1: coming back to the barnacles Carveding notes that quote the
Speaker 1: barnacles are thought to be host specific to gray whales,
Speaker 1: though there are isolated examples on captive bottlenose dolphins and
Speaker 1: beluga whales and one wild killer whale, and their life
Speaker 1: cycle is synchronous with that of their hosts. And he
Speaker 1: notes elsewhere that there are four species of whale acorn
Speaker 1: barnacles in general, in three genera. But we're talking about
Speaker 1: one particular species of acorn barnacle that is found on
Speaker 1: the skin of the gray whale, and that is Cryptolepis RACHIANECTI. Sorry,
Speaker 1: barnacles if I butchered your scientific man a little bit there, Joe,
Speaker 1: you were kind enough to include a lot of close
Speaker 1: up images of art of acorn barnacles in our notes here.
Speaker 1: Would you describe these for the listeners? Well, different barnacles
Speaker 1: have different outer appearances, and I guess this is because barnacles,
Speaker 1: much like coral, they are small marine invertebrates, but they
Speaker 1: are perhaps most visually notable for the external mineral structures
Speaker 1: that they build, and those structures can sometimes be confused
Speaker 1: with the flesh of the animals themselves. But barnacles are
Speaker 1: actually crustaceans, so they are closely related to animals like
Speaker 1: shrimp and crabs. And when you've seen barnacles in the past,
Speaker 1: probably the main thing you've noticed are these external plates,
Speaker 1: which are made of calcium carbonate. They're made of the
Speaker 1: same material as eggshells or oyster shells or coral skeletons
Speaker 1: and so forth, And in barnacles, these calcium carbonate plates
Speaker 1: can have different front appearances. Some kind of like flower
Speaker 1: buds made out of stone, or some look like cement pumpkins,
Speaker 1: some look like tiny volcano calderas. If you zoom way out,
Speaker 1: some of the colonies look as I mentioned earlier, kind
Speaker 1: of like groupings of lichen on a piece of granite.
Speaker 1: But if you zoom in and you see the shapes
Speaker 1: and you see the kind of holes at the top
Speaker 1: of each barnacle, they also kind of resembled the photos
Speaker 1: that people freak out about online. And I'm never sure
Speaker 1: how much of this freak out is kind of performative
Speaker 1: ironic thing, but about like tryptophobia images, you know, the
Speaker 1: lotus pod thing. I don't share this reaction, but while
Speaker 1: reading about barnacles, I came to glean that some people
Speaker 1: are deeply viscerally repulsed by the appearance of them. And
Speaker 1: I didn't even know if I was going to mention this,
Speaker 1: but I was seeing a couple of cases where there'd
Speaker 1: be like an article on the internet about barnacles or
Speaker 1: that featured pictures of barnacles. Then you scroll down you
Speaker 1: look at the comments, and some people are reacting not
Speaker 1: just with disgust, I mean there is plenty of that,
Speaker 1: but with like moral outrage at the author for posting
Speaker 1: these pictures, like you did something bad by showing me barnacles.
Speaker 1: I don't quite get that, but I think it may
Speaker 1: overlap with the trip to phobia thing, which, as I
Speaker 1: said a minute ago, I still am not sure how
Speaker 1: much of that is kind of like the creepy clown thing,
Speaker 1: like like a fear that people are playing up on
Speaker 1: purpose to be funny, or how much like their moral
Speaker 1: outrage is just like a genuine emotional overload reaction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure either, but I will say that, you know,
Speaker 1: with the particularly with the acorn barnacles here, they look
Speaker 1: a lot to me like the eye of sauron. They
Speaker 1: have that kind of appearance. Yeah, so there's something a
Speaker 1: little unnerving about them. Also, I think it's one thing
Speaker 1: to see barnacles like this on say the whole of
Speaker 1: the ship, or you know, barnacles of another variety, But
Speaker 1: when they're on a living organism, um, I think maybe
Speaker 1: there's sometimes sort of category confusion going on. Yes, and
Speaker 1: particularly with these sort of round aperture appearing barnacles, we
Speaker 1: I think our minds instantly go to poor an anomalies.
Speaker 1: We think of like clogged pores, We think of pimples,
Speaker 1: we think of various openings that may occur in um
Speaker 1: diseased flesh. And that's maybe where our mind goes, like
Speaker 1: that's the nearest analogy that we have as as surface
Speaker 1: dwellers and uh, and so we think about all that
Speaker 1: when we see barnacles on sale whale. Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: understand that, and I certainly share that I react differently
Speaker 1: when I see them on an animal versus on just
Speaker 1: you know, growing on the you know, the the piling
Speaker 1: that appear is resting on or something. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: seeing the whales in the wild and seeing one close up,
Speaker 1: like they're close enough where you could you could touch
Speaker 1: the barnacles if you wanted to. I did not, m
Speaker 1: and I only only touch the whale once. I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's good. We need to make physical contact with the
Speaker 1: great whale once and I'm good. But you know, there
Speaker 1: is this kind of like feeling that that you end
Speaker 1: up having her. It's like should I help? Should I scrape?
Speaker 1: You know, not that you would, but you know you
Speaker 1: want to sort of help the creature. Again. You think
Speaker 1: of it almost like a dog, whereas you're if your
Speaker 1: dog came up and your dog had some sort of orrels,
Speaker 1: seed pods or something stuck in its fur, like you'd
Speaker 1: want to help it out. If your cat has a
Speaker 1: has something stuck in its fur, you're going to reach
Speaker 1: in there and uh and pull it out and get
Speaker 1: bitten as as a thank you. But you know, the whales,
Speaker 1: they're not asking for this treatment. Well, And as I'll
Speaker 1: get to in a minute, I think there's more ambiguity
Speaker 1: than we met realizing about exactly what the pluses and
Speaker 1: minuses of this relationship are, but a little more a
Speaker 1: little more about barnacles themselves. So the life cycle of
Speaker 1: a barnacle goes like this. It begins as a microscopic
Speaker 1: larva that looks kind of like a cross between a
Speaker 1: flea and to shrimp. And in this larval stage, after
Speaker 1: being released by the parent, the barnacle swims around freely
Speaker 1: in the water column, so it begins life as a
Speaker 1: free swimming organism. It's just one of the trillions of
Speaker 1: zooplankton bobbing around out there in the ocean. And as
Speaker 1: a larva, the barnacle's primary mission is to find a home.
Speaker 1: It's looking for real estate it can stake out where
Speaker 1: it will spend the rest of its life. It does
Speaker 1: this by exploring various surfaces and testing the properties of
Speaker 1: these surfaces. A lot of species are attracted to chemicals
Speaker 1: secreted by adult barnacles that let them know they have
Speaker 1: encountered a good place to swarm and congregate. And when
Speaker 1: the larva finds a surface it approves of, it proceeds
Speaker 1: to glue its head down permanently. So the barnacle secretes
Speaker 1: a form of quick drying adhesive from its antennae, and
Speaker 1: it cements itself and this is again head down to
Speaker 1: the place where it will spend the rest of its life.
Speaker 1: Barnacle cement is one of the strongest, if not the
Speaker 1: single strongest adhesive substance known in nature, so much that
Speaker 1: scientists have studied it in hopes of developing better synthetic
Speaker 1: glues for use in medicine and microelectronics, especially in conditions
Speaker 1: where you need to glue things together that are already wet.
Speaker 1: That's kind of interesting property, as like, so you're already
Speaker 1: under the water, both surfaces are wet, so how exactly
Speaker 1: do you glue this together effectively? Interesting. Once a barnacle
Speaker 1: is fixed to whatever surface it has chosen, it begins
Speaker 1: building its calcium carbonate outer plates, and it begins eating
Speaker 1: and growing. And the barnacle's shell on the outside typically
Speaker 1: consists of plates that surround the animal on all sides
Speaker 1: to form a kind of cone, and then usually a
Speaker 1: few more plates on top that form a sort of
Speaker 1: door that the barnacle can close when it's threatened or
Speaker 1: closed to conserve moisture, say, if it's in an intertidal area,
Speaker 1: when the tide goes out, the barnacles exposed to the air,
Speaker 1: it can close up its door to keep some liquid inside,
Speaker 1: and then of course it can open them again when
Speaker 1: it is time to feed. Barnacles are filter feeders, much
Speaker 1: like baleen whales, but while whales feed by pushing water
Speaker 1: through their baleen, barnacles feed by waving their feet around
Speaker 1: in the water. Barnacles have these little legs called cerri,
Speaker 1: which are segmented like the appendages of other crustaceans, but
Speaker 1: covered in long little filaments, so they look like a
Speaker 1: cross between curly shrimp legs and peacock feathers. Rob I've
Speaker 1: attached some pictures for you to look at while I'm
Speaker 1: describing here. So they often get the kind of like
Speaker 1: fan these out, and they do really kind of look
Speaker 1: like a fan a bunch of these legs arranged in
Speaker 1: parallel with these little feathery kind of hairs coming off
Speaker 1: of them, and they essentially function like fishing nets. The
Speaker 1: barnacles wave of these cri through the water, collecting plankton
Speaker 1: and organic detritus, and then drawing them into the shell
Speaker 1: to bring the food to their mouths. Yeah, this image
Speaker 1: is very delightful, and I guess it's it's it's harder
Speaker 1: to hate on barnacles as much if you think of
Speaker 1: them as like tiny old people who set down forever
Speaker 1: on you know, say, the deck of a cruise ship,
Speaker 1: glue their butts down, and then begin to wave their
Speaker 1: fancily dressed legs in the air. Well. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be gluing their butts, it would be gluing
Speaker 1: their foreheads down. So you would have to imagine the
Speaker 1: human analogy is if you lived by gluing your forehead
Speaker 1: to a rock and then surrounding yourself with external bone
Speaker 1: places like you grow some bones on the outside, their
Speaker 1: bones that live outside. You surround yourself with that. Then
Speaker 1: you wave your feet around in the air until you
Speaker 1: catch i don't know, something dead with your toes and
Speaker 1: your leg hairs, and then you bring that down to
Speaker 1: your mouth. Okay, well that sounds a little more monstrous again,
Speaker 1: we're skewing monstrous again, but it's still delightful than Another
Speaker 1: really amazing thing about barnacles is their sexual reproduction. Barnacles,
Speaker 1: typically in the same individual, have both male and female
Speaker 1: sex organs, but they can't reproduce asexually. They don't bud
Speaker 1: like some other sessile organisms. They have to find a
Speaker 1: partner to mate with, but they're barnacles. They are stuck
Speaker 1: to one place, remember, glued the forehead down, so they
Speaker 1: can't go wandering around to locate a mate. Other sessile
Speaker 1: organisms deal with the fact that they are immobile by
Speaker 1: simply kind of spamming the water with sperm and eggs
Speaker 1: and hoping to to you know, hoping that those sex
Speaker 1: cells meet up with opposite sex cells somewhere out there.
Speaker 1: This is known as broadcast spawning. I've read it alleged
Speaker 1: in many sources. The barnacles never do this, They don't
Speaker 1: do exactly that with both sex cells, but it does
Speaker 1: seem some barnacles engage in sperm casting, or at least
Speaker 1: the sperm but not the eggs, are released into open
Speaker 1: water just in hopes that it will drift to an
Speaker 1: individual with an egg cell. This is according to one
Speaker 1: paper I found by Marion Barazande at All called Something
Speaker 1: Darwin Didn't Know about Barnacles sperm cast Mating in a
Speaker 1: common stock species, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society
Speaker 1: b Biological Sciences in twenty thirteen. This experiment found that
Speaker 1: Pacific intertital gooseneck barnacles do sometimes fertile fertilize eggs by
Speaker 1: sperm casting. But this result was surprising, and the very
Speaker 1: reason it was surprising was that for the most part,
Speaker 1: barnacles have a different strategy. They actually physically copulate, or
Speaker 1: as the scientists call it, pseudo copulate in order to
Speaker 1: exchange sperm, which means they have to find a mate
Speaker 1: by reach, which so for this reason, it has been
Speaker 1: suggested that barnacles probably have the longest penis to body
Speaker 1: size ratio of any animal on Earth, with penises measuring
Speaker 1: more than the rest of the total length of the
Speaker 1: body many times over. I've read different estimates for this.
Speaker 1: Exactly how much longer it is seems unclear, but a
Speaker 1: commonly cited figure is eight times body length. And these
Speaker 1: are used kind of how you might imagine. They sense around.
Speaker 1: They feel around at their neighbors to find a neighbor
Speaker 1: to pseudo copulate with, and barnacles can act either as
Speaker 1: males or females for the purposes of mating. So they
Speaker 1: all possess these penises, and they're fascinating and remarkably adaptable organs.
Speaker 1: Depending on environmental conditions, so like one factor is the
Speaker 1: choppiness of the water around them, so they will grow
Speaker 1: longer and calmer waters, but shorter and thicker and choppy
Speaker 1: turbulent waters, because as you can imagine, long, thin appendages
Speaker 1: are more difficult to control when the water is moving
Speaker 1: around a lot. But the properties of this organ also
Speaker 1: depend on the density of barnacle population. So when neighbors
Speaker 1: are nearby, they don't need to reach as far, so
Speaker 1: they will be shorter and less elastic. But when neighbors
Speaker 1: are sparse, when the population is less dense, they grow
Speaker 1: very long and elastic. Yeah. I remember a friend of
Speaker 1: the show, Mara Hart, in her book Sex in the
Speaker 1: Sea as the whole section talking about barnacles and their
Speaker 1: reproductive strategies. Yeah, I remember Mara having a lot of
Speaker 1: barnacle penis is officially amazing. But anyway, so as filter feeders,
Speaker 1: barnacles usually attached themselves to stationary objects in places with
Speaker 1: a lot of activity, whether that's a rock or part
Speaker 1: of a human built structure or something else that they
Speaker 1: will attach themselves to a place where there's a lot
Speaker 1: of exchange of water back and forth, because again they
Speaker 1: can't go out hunting. They need water containing their food
Speaker 1: to wash over them. So it's no good for a
Speaker 1: barnacle to sit around in calm, still waters. They want
Speaker 1: flow in exchange, location, location, location exactly. Yeah, you want
Speaker 1: foot traffic. Oftentimes this means posting up in the intertidal
Speaker 1: zone where the tides are going to charge in and
Speaker 1: then drain out throughout the day. But if you're a
Speaker 1: really lucky barnacle, you could manage to attach yourself to
Speaker 1: a rock that moves, a rock that travels along its
Speaker 1: own course, causing water full of plankton and other goodies
Speaker 1: to wash over you constantly. And for this reason you
Speaker 1: will see barnacles do well by attaching themselves to the
Speaker 1: hulls of ships. This is a common problem in shipping.
Speaker 1: But for millions of years, before there were ships, there
Speaker 1: were whales, giant boulders that swim, and of course before
Speaker 1: whales there were sea turtles. And I believe I was
Speaker 1: reading that whale barnacles derived from seaturtle barnacles. That's right.
Speaker 1: It is thought that whale barnacles evolved from what are
Speaker 1: called turtle barnacles, which don't just occupy turtles. They found
Speaker 1: them the shells of sea turtles, but also other things
Speaker 1: like the carapace of crabs, and and on some sirenians
Speaker 1: like like manatees and so forth. But you can you
Speaker 1: can imagine the why this diversification takes place when whales
Speaker 1: become a possibility. Oh, these vast expanses of high to colonize,
Speaker 1: so many whales, especially filter feeding whales, are known to
Speaker 1: accumulate barnacles, but gray whales really excel as barnacle hosts.
Speaker 1: In tons of pictures of these animals again, they just uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you will see them covered in patches of
Speaker 1: these things. There's one species of acorn barnacle you mentioned
Speaker 1: them earlier, called Cryptolipus racy and ecti. These have been
Speaker 1: allegedly living off of gray whales in particular for millions
Speaker 1: of years. But looking at whale barnacles in general, I
Speaker 1: wanted to return to this question of what is the
Speaker 1: exact symbiotic relationship between whales and their barnacles. Are the
Speaker 1: barnacles actual parasites causing net harm to their hosts, or
Speaker 1: is the relationship an example of what biologists would call
Speaker 1: commensalism where the host is not really impacted one way
Speaker 1: or the other, but the barnacle gets a benefit. Or
Speaker 1: is it possible there are mutualistic benefits. Do both the
Speaker 1: whale and the barnacle get something good out of the relationship.
Speaker 1: It seems like for a long time experts thought that
Speaker 1: whales and their barnacles were generally an example of a
Speaker 1: commensal relationship. So the barnacles get a benefit, get the
Speaker 1: benefit of a moving substrate to bring them a steady
Speaker 1: flow of plankton, as well as getting general protection from predators.
Speaker 1: And you can see this reduced risk of predation when
Speaker 1: attached to a whale body in the fact that whale
Speaker 1: barnacles in particular have evolved to possess a less defensively
Speaker 1: oriented outer plate structure they usually have rob If you
Speaker 1: compare pictures of different kind of barnacles, it seems like
Speaker 1: whale barnacles often just have more kind of fleshy bits
Speaker 1: poking out of their shells at all times. They don't
Speaker 1: close their plate doors completely or as completely, so they
Speaker 1: just seem like they have to be less focused on
Speaker 1: defense than some of their barnacles are. This probably also
Speaker 1: contributes to the disturbing quality of to some to seeing
Speaker 1: barnacles on whales, because it's more obviously some sort of
Speaker 1: creature living on the whales hide and you can't just
Speaker 1: dismiss it as seeing some sort of stone like de
Speaker 1: try this that's built up there, right, So what's undeniable
Speaker 1: is that the barnacles get a benefit from the relationship.
Speaker 1: But is it true that the relationship is basically nothing
Speaker 1: to the whale, neither helpful nor harmful. Well, this seems
Speaker 1: very debatable. For one thing, having barnacles on the skin
Speaker 1: would quite clearly reduce the hydrodynamic efficiency of the whales movement.
Speaker 1: As a point of analogy, this is not a perfect analogy,
Speaker 1: but I was reading from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation
Speaker 1: about the effect of barnacles on hips built by humans,
Speaker 1: and they write, quote, the US Navy estimates that heavy
Speaker 1: barnacle growth on ships can add weight and increase drag
Speaker 1: by nearly sixty percent, which can lead to as much
Speaker 1: as a forty percent increase in fuel consumption. Now, obviously
Speaker 1: those figures don't map exactly onto an organism like a whale,
Speaker 1: but the principle holds true. It seems clear that barnacles
Speaker 1: would make a whale a less efficient swimmer, even if
Speaker 1: only by a marginal percent. Also, the fact that whales
Speaker 1: have been observed to engage in behavior that looks like
Speaker 1: an attempt to remove barnacles would probably also mean that
Speaker 1: they are at least somewhat perceived as a nuisance by
Speaker 1: the whale, at least assuming those interpretations of that behavior
Speaker 1: is correct. Now, Robert I. Can't remember if you mentioned
Speaker 1: it earlier, but you had said something to me about
Speaker 1: observations of whales appearing to one us scrape barnacles off
Speaker 1: their body, maybe by rubbing up against things, and and
Speaker 1: maybe we don't understand exactly what the purpose of that
Speaker 1: behavior is, but it's been interpreted as an attempt to
Speaker 1: remove barnacles. Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding. And they'll do
Speaker 1: this not only on the bottoms of boats and chips,
Speaker 1: but they'll do this on rocks and in the sand,
Speaker 1: and also just through the act of feeding, because again,
Speaker 1: these are bottom feeding feeders who scrape half of their
Speaker 1: their body against the bottom of the sea. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess the thing we have to keep in mind
Speaker 1: is that it's not just the barnacles on the body,
Speaker 1: they're also the sea lies they're scarring. There's you know,
Speaker 1: there's reason to believe that. I guess a whale could
Speaker 1: itch for other reasons, or have some sort of skin
Speaker 1: irritation for other reasons, and it might be pleasurable for
Speaker 1: other reasons for it to scrape its body against something,
Speaker 1: even if that scraping does in effect remove barnacles from
Speaker 1: its its skin. Yes, so there are several ways where
Speaker 1: you might be able to interpret barnacles as parasites as
Speaker 1: causing net harm to the whales. However, I came across
Speaker 1: another idea that I thought was very interesting. Again, this
Speaker 1: is not certain, it's debatable, but some researchers have speculated
Speaker 1: there could be cases where whale barnacles are actually providing
Speaker 1: a benefit to the whale. Now, what could that be.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine by looking at it, But what
Speaker 1: has been proposed is that barnacles may serve as a
Speaker 1: form of armor or as a weapon in some cases. Now,
Speaker 1: what would be the evidence for this idea? Well, I
Speaker 1: was looking at a paper by John kb Ford and
Speaker 1: Randall R. Reeves published in The Mammal Review in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight called fight or Flight Anti predator strategies
Speaker 1: of baleen whales. Now, something we've already alluded to and
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about more extensively in the next
Speaker 1: episode is orca predation on gray whales in particular. But
Speaker 1: orcas also known as killer whales, are major predators to
Speaker 1: a number of mysticetti or baleen whale speeds, and the
Speaker 1: authors of this paper argued that understanding the role of
Speaker 1: orcas as predators has been hampered by poor understanding of
Speaker 1: the different predator prey dynamics quote, including the relative vulnerability
Speaker 1: of different misdeceit species and age classes to killer whales,
Speaker 1: and how those prey animals avoid predation. So what are
Speaker 1: the different patterns of behavior that different prey species of
Speaker 1: whales resort to when an orca starts threatening them or
Speaker 1: when a pot of orcas threatens them. The authors argue
Speaker 1: there are two main classes of behavioral response, and those
Speaker 1: are fight or flight. The flight strategy is fairly simple.
Speaker 1: When you spot killer whales, you get out of there.
Speaker 1: The authors describe the strategy as rapid monodirectional swimming away
Speaker 1: from the orcas at a pace of between twenty and
Speaker 1: forty kilometers an hour, a speed that the orcas cannot
Speaker 1: generally keep up with or will not keep up with usually,
Speaker 1: and this behavior has been observed in six species of
Speaker 1: the genus Balinoptera, which contains animals like the mink, fin
Speaker 1: and blue whales. On the other hand, many different species
Speaker 1: exhibit what the authors call the fight strategy, which quote
Speaker 1: consists of active physical defense, including self defense by single individuals,
Speaker 1: defense of calves by their mothers, and coordinated defense by
Speaker 1: groups of whales. It's documented for five mystic seats and
Speaker 1: they list the Southern right whale, the North Atlantic right whale,
Speaker 1: the bowhead whale, the humpback whale, and the gray whale.
Speaker 1: The authors argue that these strategies are not incidental, they
Speaker 1: are selected by evolution for each species to maximize survival odds.
Speaker 1: Based on the whales other physical characteristics. Species that engage
Speaker 1: in the flight strategy have streamlined bodies that are capable
Speaker 1: of fast, sustained endurance swimming. They also quote tend to
Speaker 1: favor pelagic habitats, which that means open sea, deep water
Speaker 1: and calving grounds where prolonged escape sprints from killer whales
Speaker 1: are possible. Meanwhile, they say that whales that engage in
Speaker 1: fight strategies tend to have more robust body shapes and
Speaker 1: they tend to be slower swimmers, but they're also usually
Speaker 1: maneuverable swimmers, so they might not be able to do
Speaker 1: monodirection swimming in one direction really fast for a long time,
Speaker 1: but they can kind of move around quickly within a
Speaker 1: small space if they need to, say, reposition their bodies
Speaker 1: or deliver a blow. These species also quote often calve
Speaker 1: or migrating coastal areas where proximity to shallow water provides
Speaker 1: refuge and an advantage in defense. Most fight species have
Speaker 1: either calocities, which are rough and hardened patches of skin,
Speaker 1: or incrustations of barnacles on their bodies, which may serve
Speaker 1: either primarily or secondarily as weapons or armor for defense.
Speaker 1: So I think that's a really interesting inference here. Specifically,
Speaker 1: whales that are more likely to fight predators rather than
Speaker 1: run from them also happen to be the ones that
Speaker 1: are more likely to have either calocities, these raised calloused
Speaker 1: patches of skin, or colonies of barnacles on their skin, which,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, a colony of barnacles you do
Speaker 1: not want to bite into that or get slapped with it.
Speaker 1: And the authors write that humpback whales are believed to
Speaker 1: make use of these barnacle encrusted patches as weapons steering
Speaker 1: fights between males at breeding grounds. They say, you know,
Speaker 1: there are many different kind of moves that humpback whales
Speaker 1: will do against each other. When they're displaying aggressive behaviors
Speaker 1: to other males, they will do headbutting and ramming of
Speaker 1: each other striking blows, and they will hit each other
Speaker 1: with long flippers and tail flukes, and the authors point
Speaker 1: out that these parts of the body where they will
Speaker 1: hit each other are also parts of the body areas
Speaker 1: where there are large incrustations of barnacles usually found. They say,
Speaker 1: quote a blow from a barnacle encrusted surface would likely
Speaker 1: have enhanced effectiveness in aggressive physical interactions, and from this
Speaker 1: they go on to argue that these same types of
Speaker 1: attacks are probably used by humpback whales against predatory orcas,
Speaker 1: and the barnacles probably provide an advantage in the same way. Now,
Speaker 1: the same is maybe not exactly true of gray whales,
Speaker 1: because they say gray whales don't fight quite as much.
Speaker 1: They don't show examples of intra specific aggression associated with
Speaker 1: male competition like the humpback whales do, so the males
Speaker 1: are less often fighting each other like humpback whales. But
Speaker 1: they say that barnacles on the skin of gray whales
Speaker 1: could still help protect the whales as basically a type
Speaker 1: of defensive armor. If an orca tries to ram the
Speaker 1: body of a gray whale and it's got an incrustation
Speaker 1: of barnacles on it, or they try to bite the
Speaker 1: gray whale, and they bite them on an incrustation of
Speaker 1: barnacles that seems much more likely to harm the attacking animal.
Speaker 1: This is fascinating. So on on one level, yes, than
Speaker 1: the mating of the gray whales, well, we'll probably get
Speaker 1: into that more in the next episode, but yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there definitely is more of a sort of a free
Speaker 1: love kind of vibe going on among the gray whales,
Speaker 1: So the males are not necessarily competing with each other,
Speaker 1: it seems and is now. But on the same level,
Speaker 1: I mean, the whales are going to come into contact
Speaker 1: with each other, and the barnacles do scar other whales
Speaker 1: sort of at least incidentally. This was pointed out to
Speaker 1: us in Mexico by one of the local guides on
Speaker 1: the boats. Um because they're covered in scars from various things,
Speaker 1: everything from orca attacks to barnacle scraping them via contact
Speaker 1: with other whales. And yeah, this is an interesting idea though,
Speaker 1: because on one level, a really good blow from a
Speaker 1: fluke or a flipper from a gray whale I've read
Speaker 1: it is enough to certainly to kill a man, but
Speaker 1: also could potentially kill an orca in one blow as well.
Speaker 1: But I guess you're not necessarily going to get that
Speaker 1: killer blow every time. Sometimes you're just going to maybe
Speaker 1: make a lighter contact or a near miss. And you
Speaker 1: can imagine those scenarios would be enhanced by some sort
Speaker 1: of barnacle encrusting. Possibly. Now, to come back on that,
Speaker 1: you can imagine other reasonings as well that there might
Speaker 1: be this correlation where species that are more likely to
Speaker 1: stand and fight when attacked by orcas rather than run away,
Speaker 1: are also the ones more likely to be encrusted with barnacles.
Speaker 1: Maybe there is a common cause, like barnacles don't actually
Speaker 1: make useful armor or make useful weapons, but the slow
Speaker 1: swimming that make a gray whale have to rely on
Speaker 1: fighting rather than rapid escape also makes it more susceptible
Speaker 1: to barnacle infestation. That kind of thing could be possible,
Speaker 1: But I think it's an interesting correlation, and it makes
Speaker 1: you wonder how you would test that further, Like could
Speaker 1: you compare different individual whales of the same species and
Speaker 1: look at maybe how much barnacle loading they have and
Speaker 1: then observe their relative success. It's a protecting calves from orcapods.
Speaker 1: Do mothers with more barnacles win more fights against orcas
Speaker 1: and so forth. I mean, it's also worth noting in
Speaker 1: all of this that the young gray whales again have
Speaker 1: no barnacles. They're born without barnacles. They will accumulate barnacles,
Speaker 1: but it takes a little time for the hard barnacles
Speaker 1: to actually build up, so especially during that period when
Speaker 1: they're leaving those sheltered lagoons, this is when they're at
Speaker 1: their most vulnerable for a number of reasons. However, it's
Speaker 1: all another thing the authors point out that I think
Speaker 1: it's where remembering is that whales, including gray whales, are
Speaker 1: not Orca's only prey, and they are an especially dangerous
Speaker 1: and costly type of prey for the orcas to pursue.
Speaker 1: The author's right quote, the rarity of observed successful attacks
Speaker 1: by killer whales on baleen whales, especially adults, maybe an
Speaker 1: indication of the effectiveness of these anti predator strategies. Baleen
Speaker 1: whales likely offer low profitability to killer whales relative to
Speaker 1: some other marine mammal prey. High speed pursuit of flight
Speaker 1: species has a high energetic cost and the low probability
Speaker 1: of success, while attacks on fight species can involve prolonged
Speaker 1: handling times and a risk of serious injury. So the
Speaker 1: baleen whales here are are not helpless against these orcas, Like,
Speaker 1: they put up a real fight. And if the orcas
Speaker 1: are going to eat a whale calf, like they will
Speaker 1: make them work for it. Though of course, yeah, they
Speaker 1: will work for it. They are hard workers the orca.
Speaker 1: But as is often the case, we've discuss this with
Speaker 1: various predator prey relationships, like it's it's every little bit
Speaker 1: of deterrent um that adds up to survival. Like anything
Speaker 1: that makes you a slightly more difficult meal than you,
Speaker 1: you increase the odds that the predators will realize that
Speaker 1: this is not worth it. Yeah, and we'll get into
Speaker 1: this in the next episode. I mean, that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons the lagoons are safe harbors is that is
Speaker 1: that that they have found a place to go that
Speaker 1: do not favor the orcas. And the orcas intelligent um
Speaker 1: pack or pod hunters that they are. Uh, they will
Speaker 1: attack their most one of their most dangerous prey when
Speaker 1: they have the the optimal advantage, when they have everything
Speaker 1: lining up for them. Uh, They're not gonna They're not
Speaker 1: gonna do it. If they if they don't have a
Speaker 1: key advantage. So I guess more on that next time. Yeah, wait,
Speaker 1: before we close out, what do you what do you
Speaker 1: think about the barnacle armor slash weapon hypothesis. You think
Speaker 1: that's got anything going for it or not? I like it.
Speaker 1: I certainly buy that at least partial encrusting with barnacles
Speaker 1: would perhaps provide this incidental extra level of defense or offense.
Speaker 1: I just I'm not as sure how that maybe factors
Speaker 1: into um like the grander like evolutionary scheme of things,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, and how it balances out against I guess,
Speaker 1: uh negative impacts from say introducing dragon swimming and other things, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: or or mating behavior and so forth. But I mean,
Speaker 1: they've they've been scrapy with barnacles for a long time,
Speaker 1: so they're they're accustomed to it. It is it is
Speaker 1: a part of who they are, which I think is
Speaker 1: one of the big take homs for again for thinking
Speaker 1: about gray whales and their barnacles and their life and
Speaker 1: their most notable predator like these these are are creatures
Speaker 1: that are not only a part of their lives, but
Speaker 1: they have shaped the life of the gray whale. They've
Speaker 1: shaped the gray whale is and you can't remove them
Speaker 1: from the scenario. All right, Well, on that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to go ahead and call it for this episode.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in the next core episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind to discuss gray whales in greater detail.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about there there were more about the relationship
Speaker 1: with the orcas. We'll talk about some of the variety
Speaker 1: of orcas as well. We'll kind of go in an
Speaker 1: orca's tangent, and then we'll get into more details about
Speaker 1: their migration and their reproduction. In the meantime, we'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from everyone out there. Do you have experiences
Speaker 1: with gray whales that you would like to share with
Speaker 1: us right in we'd love to hear them. Heck, if
Speaker 1: you have any experience with whales, if you've any any
Speaker 1: whale watchers out there and you want to tell us
Speaker 1: about other species of whales that you're super into, let
Speaker 1: us know. I'm I'm I'm all revved up on whales
Speaker 1: and dolphins and porpoises right now, so I'm excited to
Speaker 1: see your photos and hear your stories. A reminder that
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast
Speaker 1: with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we
Speaker 1: do listener mail, on Wednesday's we do a short form
Speaker 1: artifact or monster fact, and on Friday's we do Weird
Speaker 1: House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious
Speaker 1: concerns and just talk about a weird film huch. Thanks
Speaker 1: to our audio producer J. J. Paseway. If you would
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
Speaker 1: the future, or just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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